Dr. Nigel Helyer; is an internationally prominent sculptor and sound artist, whose interdisciplinary practice combines art and science to embrace our social, cultural and physical environments. He brings these concerns together in creative projects that prompt the community to engage with their cultural histories, identity and sense of place, inviting us to examine the abstract conditions of our world and our complex relationships to it. His creative output spans forty years, ranging from large public artworks to Biennales, Triennales and Museum and Gallery exhibitions.
Nigel is a strong advocate for experimental art and a specialist in art and science collaborations, notably creating cultural works that transform scientific data into tangible forms that reveal the patterns and structures that underlie the natural world. He has an impressive track record of long-term collaboration with peak research bodies such as the Paul Scherrer Laboratory (Switzerland), The Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (Hobart), The Water Research Laboratory (Sydney), The Centre for Integrated Bee Research and the SymbioticA Lab (UWA, Perth). He was the co-founder of SoundCulture International and was responsible for commissioning several large international sound-art festivals in the Asia-Pacific zone.
He was a lead artist/researcher at Lake Technology (now Dolby Australia) developing “Sonic Landscapes” an augmented-audio-reality, location-sensitive system, that subsequently was developed as the “AudioNomad Research Group” at UNSW (Sydney).
Nigel is active in critical thought and is a prolific contributor to journals, conferences and radio broadcasts. He is a board member of the Paris-based Association Internationale de Critiques d’Art and was the founding editor and publisher of PraxisM the contemporary art journal of Western Australia. Nigel has authored several books, including “Crayvox”, “The Deluge Ark(ive)”, “Culturescape: An Ecology of Bundanon” and “When Science Meets Art”. His writing embraces speculative fiction including the graphic novel “Sonique” and the novel “Freeze Frame”, a fiction about the relationship between Cinema and the Afterlife.
Nigel is an honorary Professor in Media Arts and Culture at Macquarie University, Sydney, and a visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (UTAS) Hobart, Tasmania, and at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland.