TCL has announced Melbourne-based artist James Geurts as the winner of the 2020 Kevin Taylor Legacy Creative Grant. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation and photography, Geurts’ practice explores how natural and cultural forces shape our perception.
Geurts will use the grant to develop the Eon Project – a “conceptual land-art project” that examines different experiences of time through the lens of the formation of South Australia’s Flinders Ranges.
Geurts investigations map the intersections of forces and how they relate to human perception. In 2018 he created Floodplain, a series of sculptures along the Yarra (Birrarung) River that marked the transformation of the waterway by human and non-human forces. Other recent works include a sculpture at Hobart’s Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park (GASP) that marks the site where fresh and saltwater meet and a light sculpture in Taiwan that explored the vulnerability of Taipei’s Tamsui River.
The Eon project will build upon earlier work by Geurts in the Flinders Ranges and will “examine the relationship between geophysics and consciousness [and how one might] imagine the past as both present and future.”
The Kevin Taylor Legacy was established in 2015, after TCL founding director Kevin Taylor. The Kevin Taylor Legacy Creative Grant provides a selected individual or group with a $9,000 residency program to support a project that explores the human relationship to landscape and the civic condition.
“Geurts’ proposal presented a considered, and gently evolving project that will seamlessly present the deep connectedness of the site (land) and people (culture) through a scientific iconography referencing imperceptible geographic forces that are at the same time deeply motivating and curious in nature,” said Lisa Byrne, jury member and director of McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery.
An exhibition of the work from the Eon Project will be shown at TCL’s Adelaide and Melbourne studios in late 2020.
To read Tim Edensor’s article on the work of James Geurts go here.
