Steel sculptures blending natural history with industrial structures and marine architecture reverberated with a soundscape of the site’s remembered past.
Artist: Nigel Helyer
This artwork is no longer at this location.
Artwork description
Dual Nature was a sound sculpture on the foreshore of Woolloomooloo Bay beside Andrew (Boy) Charlton Pool.
The artwork included 4 cone-shaped steel sculptures blending forms found in natural history with those of industrial structures and marine architecture. Two of the sculptures stood on a sandstone shelf that was once the site of the Fig Tree Baths. The others stood on the rocks partially submerged at high tide.
The semi-submerged shapes were linked by cables to 2 stainless steel sculptures in the form of cranes, which provided ‘a visual metaphor of retrieval or launching, forming a strong link to the maritime history of Garden Island’.
The semi-submerged sculptures acted as reverberation chambers, their tone constantly changing as the tide filled and emptied them. Within the land-based sculptures, hidden solar-powered audio systems broadcast a complimentary soundscape.
The Ebb and Flow soundscape was composed from ‘multiple interwoven elements of voice narrative drawn from the historical context of Woolloomooloo’. The artist, Nigel Helyer, drew this historical material from textual records and, wherever possible, from sound archives.
“The soundscape is intended to meld with the ambient sounds of the environment – predominantly natural waterscape, with some shipping highlights and the quiet reverberations from within the semi-submerged sculptures. This combination of voice fragments, natural history sounds and atmospheres should seem as if the site itself was remembering its past.”
– Nigel Helyer
Artist
Nigel Helyer was born in the UK and now lives in Sydney. He studied at the Liverpool College of Art, The Royal College of Art in London and the University of Technology Sydney.
Helyer has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, has received various awards and fellowships, and has undertaken artist residencies in the UK, Asia, US, Australia and New Zealand. He has created several large-scale public sculptures and environmental works in Asia, the US, Europe and Australia.
His practice focuses on sculpture and sound, and the relationship of the body, the environment and memory to sound.
Inscription
A plaque beside the artwork read:
It is as if Mother Nature had overstepped her bounds and formed an alliance with Industry; or indeed, the foundry men in the Navel workshops had turned their hands to Marine Biology.
These hybrids of marine, industrial and natural forms cling to the shoreline of Woolloomooloo Bay like abandoned hulks reflecting the maritime and cultural history of the site.
Partly submerged at high tide the water sculptures are intended to act as natural reverberation chambers.
These ambient sounds mix with the pre-recorded Soundscape located within the land based sculptures.
Entitled Ebb and Flow, the Soundscape relates to the history of people and shipping flowing in and out of the bay.
