[ISEA2013] Roundtable: Nigel Helyer – Milk and Honey

Roundtable Statement

Roundtable: SITEWORKS: Ecologies and Technologies

Bundanon is a canvas worked and reworked, an image floating over underpainting after underpainting, never quite obscuring the historical layers that resonate from a deep past. The hand of Boyd pushing a brush, a crawling Nebuchadnezzar, a farmhand chopping timber, a tribal owner cutting sugarbag (honey) from a blue gum, the river slowly eroding the mountain. “A land flowing with Milk and Honey” is the phrase from Exodus describing the agricultural plenty of the chosen land. Early colonial settlers to the Shoalhaven region forged their own path towards this metaphor of plenty in a life that melded European practices and stereotypes with a landscape chosen but unknown and perhaps unknowable.

  • Nigel Helyer, Sonic Objects, Australia

Full text (PDF) p. 91