TRAJECTORIES: ORBITING BODIES MEET
Site-responsive Sculpture Commission
4th Floor Terrace
Shepparton Museum of Art 2022
GAGPROJECTS

Trajectories: Orbiting Bodies Meet is a site-responsive neon installation drawing on the museum’s close geographical proximity to the landing site of the Murchison meteorite. Connecting the primordial to the technological, the abstracted sculptural form suggests the intense light generated by the directional force of a meteorite entering our atmosphere, and the moment of impact with the earth’s skin. Identified as one of the most primitive and profound astronomical bodies, the Murchison meteorite has been the subject of intense study as the complex organic compounds found within it are thought to contain the building blocks of life. The development of this project was supported through ANAT Synapse program and working with CSIRO scientists.

'When the philosopher Michel Serres declares, "In the beginning are the meteors’, he enacts another amalgamate event: the fusing of physical cosmology with poesis." Poesis, from the ancient Greek meaning 'to make’, in Serres’ hands entwines the astrophysical with the metaphysical and the physicality, we might say, of language itself. In parallel albeit material fashion, Geurts enacts his own cosmological fusions, melding astrophysics with an artist’s gaze, conjuring new multiplicities that pivot on linking the chemical, the aesthetic, the sculptural and the astrophotographic.' 
Excerpt from 'The Intersecting Trajectories of Cosmic Matter’ essay by Sophie Knezic