Standing Wave: Pt Nepean
Kinetic site-responsive light sculpture
Fluorescent tubes, intervened circuitry, aluminium structure
5.2m x 4.2m x .4m
Q-Studio, Quarantine Station, Point Nepean National Park/Monmar
Curated by Cameron Bishop and Danny Lacy,
supported by David Cross and Simon Reis
FRONTBEACHBACKBEACH Festival 2022
Time and tide have shaped this project, just as they have Monmar and Port Phillip Bay, over millennia. James Geurts has opened up his practice to the elements and the people in a work that will evolve over the course of November, firstly developed in-situ at the Quarantine Station, and then, as a closing gesture (site-responsive light installation), at the tip of Point Nepean. He finds the confluence of things, between the primordial, the technological and the astronomical. The rip is a notorious body of water that fulminated into life when the seas rose a few thousand years ago, deriving its power from where two heaving masses of water, the ocean and the Bay, meet. What Geurts’ drawings, digital renderings, and finally, his sculpture call on here is a reverence for how the shape of the sea floor, and forces of the moon and tides bring the phenomenon of the standing wave into being. The name describes it perfectly, it’s a wave that appears to hold its form, without moving, and yet the forces that go into its eminence are planetary, much like our own bearing on the world.
Project text by Cameron Bishop