Projects

Freeze Frame; Cinema and the Afterlife.

Quelle est votre plus grand ambition dans la vie? Devenire immortel et puis mourir. Jean-Luc Godard, À bout de souffle 1960. Fictionalising fiction. As a thirteen-year-old lad, I along with a couple of friends, were once left to kick our heels for the day in central London —we were the crew in a sailing regatta…
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BioSphere/DataSphere

The BioSphere|DataSphere project acknowledges the deep, longstanding and ongoing connection of the Palawa and Pakana people to the wild, beautiful coast and sea country where the Tasman Fracture Marine Park is situated. Between 2021 and 2024 artist Nigel Helyer worked with an interdisciplinary and multi-agency, team of scientists researching the environmental productivity of the Tasman…
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Sonus Maris; the concert!

The Sonus Maris concert was developed in collaboration with the New Music Collective (UNSW) as an elaboration of the original data-derived monophonic musical scores. In terms of objectives, the original plan was to create an audio-visual work for the International Conference of Coastal Engineers, which was duly held at the Sydney International Conference Centre in…
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Sonique; the life and art of Dr Sonique (the Graphic Novel)

Sonique; the Life and Art of Dr.Sonique, is the authorised biography of Dr. Nigel Helyer in the form of a speculative fiction Graphic Novel. The work is a collaboration between Sydney-based comic writer Mark Hobby, the Taiwan-based graphic designer The Milkman, and Dr. Sonique himself who provided copious amounts of factual, anecdotal, and totally fictional…
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Sonus Maris_V2

Download the Sonus Maris – Catalogue (mobile) Download the essay from ISEA 2022 Sonus Maris_Helyer_ISEA22(small) Download the Interview Sonus Maris _An interview with Nigel Helyer Listen to Sonus Maris the Concert Sonus Maris the Concert Part 1; an orientation. We are neurologically predisposed to seek patterns in our surroundings, in fact, pattern recognition is…
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The Past is our Future; The Future is our Past.

The exhibition The Past is our Future; The Future is our Past is the outcome of an Artist in Residence with the Broken Hill City Art Gallery undertaken during 2021 and 2022 (with several interruptions by Covid19). The project builds on my longstanding relationship with the mining boom town and its layered history. The project –…
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Sounds and Sweet Airs

Sounds and Sweet Airs is part of a long-term web project Soniferous Cities; Islands of Sound that experiments with the creation of sonic cartographies. The project which is part of the Öres21 Summer Exhibition aims to create rich interactive audio-portraits of a range of geographies, environments and communities. Sounds and Sweet Airs links sites on…
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Freeze Frame

Freeze Frame is a novel that explores the relationship between Cinema and the Afterlife. Set in a ‘soft’ post-environmental apocalypse the narrative features a set of semi-feral youths who also happen to be avid Cinephiles who attend the last functioning Cinema in the world. The Orpheum Cinema is managed by a mysterious group of Greek…
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Scribbly Gum Suites

The Scribbly gum tree; Eucalyptus haemastoma, Eucalyptus racemosa and Eucalyptus rossii are found throughout New South Wales coastal plains and hills in the Sydney region. These Eucalypts are easily identifiable by the graphic scribbles created under their smooth yellow-grey bark by the larva of the Ogmograptis racemosa scribbly gum moth caterpillars. The gum-tree stands by…
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Virtual talking in 2020

Here are two short video presentations given at the TTT conference (virtually in Wien, Austria 2020) Tracing Silence; Ecocide and Omnicide Co-composition and De-Composition; Biological Agency as a Compositional Tool.
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Sonus Maris

The Brain is wider than the Sky For put them side by side The one the other will contain With ease and You, beside The Brain is deeper than the sea For hold them Blue to Blue The one the other will absorb As Sponges, Buckets do The Brain is just the weight of God…
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The Oratorio for a Million Souls

The Oratorio for a Million Souls is a major feature of the European Capital of Culture, Leeuwarden (Fryslan) 2018 Silence of the Bees programme. The project consists of bee listening architectures constructed in three European botanical gardens, located in Buitenpost (Fryslan) and Emden and Oldenburg (Germany).
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Two Islands

Two Islands, Franklin Square. This public art project was developed with the aim of representing the tangible and intangible layers of history and meaning in Franklin Square. The project was commissioned by the City of Hobart and was inaugurated in November 2018 after a three-year development and building programme that included extensive community consultation and…
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LandFall

LandFall is situated in the marina of Port Coogee, Western Australia and responds to the history of the wreck of the Omeo that lies close to the shore. The Omeo was built in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1858 as an iron steamship but was later converted to sail. She was lost in a storm on the Western…
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The Deluge Ark(ive)

The Deluge Ark(ive). The Deluge Ark(ive) exhibition comprises an exhibition, the launch of an Artist’s book and a performance event at the new Moonah Arts Centre in Hobart, Tasmania (16th November to the 16th December 2017). The project arose in a curious manner. Some three years ago I was engaged by Sabanci University in Istanbul…
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