eDuard Helmbold

Who am I?

I am a dung beetle.

When livestock was introduced through colonisation it also introduced countless pests and ecological disruption. In the 1970’s the CSIRO introduced dung beetles from South Africa into our eco-system to assist with the breaking down of the wet dung patties of introduced livestock. Dung beetles are one of the few introduced species in Australia that contributes to balance and not disruption. 

As a white, male, Afrikaans speaking immigrant living in Australia. As part of the transitional Apartheid generation in South Africa I have become very aware of the privilege I grew up with (and live in) and acknowledge that I was a silent benefactor of apartheid. My exploration of nostalgia and shame is as much about research as it is about self-discovery and personal emancipation.

My life and art practice centres around creating space for the shit and shame of our existence with the belief that beauty and balance can emerge from it. My work explores stories and histories in a way that tempers shame with the goal to create space for empathy to emerge. This is true for my art practice as it is in my day-job as an alcohol and drug counsellor.  

What do I do?

Dung beetles don’t just bring beauty and balance out of mounds of faeces; when dung beetles get lost, they dance.

My work is driven by this dance between narrative, process, and materiality. 

My objects and installations (like RAKA, I Acknowledge and Echoes of Ancient Sorrows) are often employed to connect viewers to a narrative stream. These streams stem from my reading and misreading of literary, philosophical, and personal history texts. 

Yet, narrative doesn’t always fill the space, in my practice (as in Elegy of the Pale Lion), the aim of the work is to hold open space for other’s stories to emerge?. By creating space for the audience to share their own personal and collective histories, people’s stories can be heard and treated with the integrity they deserve.

For me, Process is about permission and restraint. At the start of each project a set of permissions and restraints are created. Sometimes the restraints are embedded in the physical context of the work, like the lack of certain materials/services during a residency. 

Permission and restraint also guides my day to day making in the studio. These processes lead to an intentionality in everything I do, from my experiments to mistakes to the materials I choose.

Industrial materials (copper, plastics, rubber, motor-oil) and found objects are often joined with organic materials (cow manure, salt, water, meat) in ways that create works that are beguiling yet abject. As these materials are used and reused in sculptures and performances they become further imbued with narrative and meaning, leaning into a materialist worldview where, every-THING is matter, where all matter has agency, where all matter is political, where all matter matters.

This is all a whole lot of words to say my practice consists of sculpture and performance – and I use narrative, process, and materials to generate ideas, make my objects, and overcome the obstacles I come across while doing it. My making process most often stems from various ways of mould making and casting and my performances arise from my process of making, a ritualising of certain steps to create space and time to fill it with narrative.