Refraction Principle
James Geurts
GASP (Glenorchy Art & Sculpture Park), nipaluna (Hobart), lutruwita (Tasmania). 2018.
Curated by Jonathan Kimberley
“My senses lie to me. They inform me that straight sticks in water are bent. There is no conclusive way to prove that all my experiences aren’t just dreams or hallucinations.”
Refraction Principle marks the site where fresh river water and salt tidal water meet, creating a ‘Salt Wedge’. The schism in the sculpture embodies the opposition between invisible and apparent forces at the site and those acting in perception. The work is installed in the river and is viewable from Wilkinson’s Point.
Refraction Principle distills an extended period of research that follows on from Geurts’ participation in the Swimmable! LAB in 2014 (curated by Pippa Dickson). Geurts undertook extensive on-site research and development of his project during a two-month residency with GASP and UTAS, Nov.-Dec 2015. This included the staging of a tidal drawing action: Drawing in: Derwent River (low tide-high tide). On the 4th November Geurts launched a small row boat from the GASP site, Wilkinson’s Point at precisely 10:39am (low-tide), and set adrift upriver with the incoming tide for 5 hours until 03:42pm. The tidal line drawing that he produced references psycho-topographical mapping and the fluid dynamics of the river. The currents took him across the Derwent, past MONA, drawing him upriver, where he drifted ashore near the Cadbury factory.
Essay by Michael Graeve and Jonathan Kimberley
A Glitch
The spit of land here intersects with the convergence of water and time. A land-form edge encroaching on the meeting of two waters, a tidal shifting of salty and fresh; a brinkmanship between depth and light, a slipping of a salt wedge over and over. A perpetual conversation, a negotiation, a backward and a forward, or the backword and the foreword; yet how might spaces be negotiated? meanings established? and the curvature?
The horizon as an event, as a place where the known and the unknown overlap. We experience it symbolised through cycles of knowledge and social superimposition. Horizon as slippage between glances and locus and misinterpretations. Of refraction and reflection. The tilt provides the energy and the potential. Think of a lightning bolt before it begins to zig and zag, a strangely charged poisedness. The moment of a shift.
The surface of water as a form of interruption. An optical tilt performed on shapes encountering imperception between water and air. A question, for we understand the continuity of lines, especially when interrupted. The moment of shift and tilt and change of direction, a rare moment of shallow time in deep time. A glitch.
Like a sudden surge in current, the thing leans and stands, both in reach and at a remove, just close enough and just far enough away to shape shift intentions. A relationship to us, it’s neither monumental nor diminutive. In relation to our surrounds, an action perhaps symbolic more than physical. An object sufficiently formed and scaled to interrupt, yet dissolve.
Referring to the skin of a tree, but immobile in stiffness it must be artificial. A stick. Stuck.
A skein in-between.
Essay by Michael Graeve and Jonathan Kimberley, October 2018.
