Where I
begin.
I begin with curiosity. Something catches my attention before I know what to make of it.
Wind moving through trees. A pond changing slowly. A landscape that slips past a train window. What interests me often begins as a sensation rather than a question — something I want to remain with a little longer.
Staying with what appears.
As a child, I stretched rubber bands between branches to hear the wind. Spiders slowly turned the garden into a landscape of webs. Small gestures opened situations whose outcomes I could not predict.
The same curiosity still draws me towards places and processes that ask for time: watching, listening, waiting and returning. These are ways of becoming attentive to what is already happening, without assuming I can fully know it from a distance.
Making room for encounters.
In The Sensorium, changing light becomes part of a soundscape that unfolds with its surroundings. In Unfixing Horizons, photographic images become translucent surfaces arranged in space. On the Shinkansen, the sounds of travelling participate in the formation of photographs of the passing landscape.
I make field experiments, apparatuses and temporary environments in which human, technological and more-than-human processes meet. Cameras, microphones, code and materials do not simply record what is there. They select, translate and shape what can emerge, while also being exposed to the conditions of a place.
I set up these situations and remain responsible for the choices built into them, but their outcomes are not entirely mine to determine. I follow what happens and look back at what the apparatus made possible, what resisted it and what it left out.
What remains,
what continues.
Some works are situations that continue to unfold, as in an installation. Others take the form of photographs, soundscapes, objects, texts or recordings: material and sensory traces of encounters that have taken place. These are not separate from the research, nor are they simply its end products.
No trace can preserve an encounter in full. It carries the marks of particular processes and decisions, and may enter into new relations when shown, heard or read elsewhere. I continue to ask what to retain, what a medium makes possible or excludes, and how an encounter might continue beyond the situation in which it began.
A little context.
Jeroen Zwaap (1980) is an artist and artistic researcher based in The Hague, the Netherlands. He holds a BA in Photography (2023) and an MA in Photography & Society (2025) from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague. His practice moves between artistic field research, photography, sound, code and installation.
Alongside his artistic work, he has worked in learning and development and systemic coaching — another context in which he has become interested in the conditions through which change and understanding emerge.
Continue the
conversation.
If something here catches your attention, there are many ways to continue — through a question, a work, a research board or a conversation.