Artist: Nigel Helyer Work: KelleRadioActive (2005) Location: Kellerberrin, Western Australia
KelleRadioActive is an “audio-portrait” woven from the oral history of the residents of Kellerberrin, capturing community experiences of listening to the radio. The history of broadcast media and communications technology has developed at an alarming pace in the last century and it is easy to forget the central role that radio has played in Australian communities as a form of entertainment, and as a vital communication link.
KelleRadioActive, a short-term radio station for the town of Kellerberrin, consisted of a rich tapestry of stories, memories, sing-a-longs, radio serials and radio histories collected from, and created by, the locals during Nigel Helyer’s stay in Kellerberrin. It was broadcast within the gallery and on Kellerberrin’s main street.
The gallery exhibition, held in the IASKA Kellerberrin gallery, showcased donated and defunct radios adapted to broadcast the oral histories gathered by Helyer. A low-power FM radio broadcasted (under legal requirements), KelleRadioActive to the township and to passers-by in vehicles.
About the artist: Dr. Nigel Helyer; an internationally prominent sculptor and sound artist is a contemporary polymath 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.