Blue-print: human/hydrokinetic drawing projects
Creators: name: Geurts, James
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024

description: Blue-Print: Human/Hydrokinetic Drawing Projects, is based on an expanded field of drawing practice, centering on a series of spatial and time-based projects at various bodies of water around the world. Blue-Print drawing projects set out to describe a language that articulates a human/hydrokinetic relationship. This expanded drawing practice emerges through diverse forms of installation, video, land-art, kinetic sculpture, light works, sensor-drawing, photography, living-monochromes, sound, durational events and research.<br><br>This expanded drawing practice is based on an inquiry into the relationships between land/place and thought/movement. It addresses the processes through which landscape, and its forms, are internalised in conceptual space, and the ways in which conceptual frameworks are projected outwards onto the landscape.<br><br>The work is informed by, and contributes to, the paradigms of eco-poetics and psychogeography. Both of these paradigms engage with the relationships between the physical world and the human experience of space and time. Combining the two through my practice creates a view of the environment and the human as two interdependent circulatory systems. Bodies of water/weather cycles/conceptual systems/the human as a water-body, these are subjects in my work as much as the sense of circulation comes through methodologically and aesthetically in the actual making and form of my expanded drawings.<br><br>This approach to art practice uses process in a particular way, that is as a primary means of making an artwork, although it could be said that such an approach is also an anti-method in as much as the 'method' is variable - it is continually invented given the situation/circumstances. What is consistent is a dynamic of proliferation; the work spreads out in different directions and in unpredictable ways. Here process is not for 'outcome' but is the work itself.<br><br>My overall practice has taken drawing as the base from which to work. My works are combinational and connective. They are based on a type of research that is deliberate, intense and composite, and which activates the spaces of transformation that exist in the movement between landscape and thought, the circulation between environment and human.<br><br>This investigation uses human engagement with moving bodies of water to generate drawings in a variety of ways, according to the specifics of each hydrokinetic system. This interest in human/hydrokinetic relationships stems from my experiences as a surfer and surfing is one of the means with which I create drawing works within this investigation. I am interested in the unique and dynamic complexity of hydrokinetics in each of the chosen locations and how this complexity of movement influences the drawing/ recording process.<br><br>I am interested in generating real-time drawing works from the particular intersection of: place; time; human/hydrokinetic activity; ecological forces at work and the specific ways in which these variables all affect the resultant form of abstraction. Further to this I am interested in exploring the capacity of abstraction to access, and refer to, psychological space more readily than naturalistic renderings of the landscape.<br>