Nigel Helyer
Nigel Helyer | UK/Australia b.1951 | VoxÆther_04 2010 | Working drawing | © Courtesy the artist
Nigel Helyer (aka Dr Sonique) has developed an art practice in which sound emerges as an important part of experience and perception. He has addressed issues of cultural amnesia, the environment, and narrative using aural media and radio forms.
Helyer’s new series VoxÆther 01-04 2010 is an extension of his BioSonic series of sculptures, which he began making in 2008, and reveal the artist’s ease with art, science and technology. The works are based on the forms of radiolarians, which are tiny single-celled organisms found in the oceans as holoplankton. These organisms fascinated German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who named and classified over 4000 species, and whose detailed writings and drawings on the subject helped transform perceptions of the oceans, revealing them to be environments teeming with life. Combined with theremin technology, the elegant Perspex sculptures convey, in material and synthetic form, the wonder of biological structures and the operations of sound waves.
The theremin, first launched in 1920, is known as the earliest electronic instrument. Its two antennae sense physical presence to control pitch and volume, and its warbling, spooky sound has become synonymous with the soundtracks of B-grade horror films. While we now take for granted the gestural interface of systems like Wii, Helyer highlights the theremin as one of the forgotten technologies of the last century, and reveals our ongoing fascination and enchantment with effects that we control without touch. In Helyer’s work, it’s the resonances between objects and our experience that make contact.
2010 artists | Philip Brophy | Nigel Helyer | Chris Howlett |Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine | Wade Marynowsky | Soda_Jerk | Lynette Wallworth
