H₂O: Water and light speak to us

Juan Geuer's goal is to find ways to integrate the seemingly inanimate into our visceral experience — to give us access to what we really are at the most fundamental level.

H₂O: Science meets art when a laser brings to light the invisible tensions in water molecules. Photo by: Juan Geuer

His installation piece H₂O was recently acquired by the National Art Gallery of Canada. After patiently observing this piece in action, a woman commented to Geuer that the art was analogous to the “experience of giving birth.” What she'd watched for almost 10 minutes was an optical dance — the slow swelling and eventual fall of a single drop of water constantly transforming the light of an unwavering red laser beam, a combination that cast complex, morphing refracted light on the wall behind.

The artist recalls the viewer's comment as casting deep light on his work. “We're mostly water and so the type of dynamic we observe in H₂O goes on in our bodies all the time. But how do we link our emotional make-up with what goes on at the molecular and atomic level of water?” says Geuer, who turns 90 this year.

Originally an artist working with glass, Geuer came to Canada from Holland, via Bolivia, in 1954. He spent much of his career as a scientific draftsman and equipment inventor with the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa. This personal melding of science and art infuses his work — his bookshelves combine tomes ranging from the Fisher Scientific Catalogue to works on the art of Jackson Pollock. In 1998, broadcaster Peter Gzowski profiled Geuer in the series “Great minds of our times.”

H₂O is classic Geuer — it combines simple physical forms, and in this case a deceptively reductionist title, to reveal a much more complex story. H₂O itself looks as much like a prototype operating room apparatus as an artwork. On a metal table is an accordion-like water pump driven by a finely calibrated motor. A length of intravenous tubing connected to a glass pipette extends from the pump. Over the course of about 8 minutes the pump forces out a single drop of water. Mounted below the tabletop is the red laser, aimed to pass through the drop as it grows.

The resulting chaotic light pattern is caused by catastrophe optics as the laser light interacts with the constantly changing water droplet: changes caused by effects from surface tension and gravity to dust. Catastrophe optics is Nature's optics: it describes how rays of light focus in the presence of interference. It's the optics of light on the dancing ocean wavelets creating a sparkling sheen, rather than light symmetrically focused by a lens. The light show generated by H₂O reveals water's molecular essence, its powerful polar bonding that is the root of its nature as the universal solvent, and thus as a life force.

For many, the effect of H₂O is more spiritual than physical. In this way, Geuer puts us in touch with the enchantment of the Renaissance — the insight that beauty and truth have no boundaries, that science, art, medicine and faith flow in and out of one another.

“We've created false boundaries between these things. We have to find new ways to gain integrity,” says Geuer.

The water and light speak to us, and Geuer creates the opportunity for us to patiently observe the alternating simplicity and complexity of what we're made of, one drop at a time.

Figure. Photo by: Juan Geuer

Geuer's WiS (Water in Suspense), is a “sister” work of H₂O. WiS used intravenous tubing and a peristaltic pump, like the ones used for accurate infusion of drugs, to precisely dole out each droplet. Similar to H₂O, a laser light was aimed through the growing droplet. An additional blue light can be placed behind the piece, such that a viewer standing in front of the blue light will cast a shadow onto the wall, whereby the dancing images cast on the wall by the water droplet will appear to be within the viewer's body. WiS is in the artist's studio collection.

Figure. Photo by: Juan Geuer