Transformations: Image, Time & Landscape

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery presents Transformations: Image, Time & Landscape | Nicole Welch: A Mid-Career Survey, curated by Richard Perram OAM.

Transformations: Image, Time & Landscape surveys 27 years of work by Hill End-based artist Nicole Welch. Throughout her career and across mediums, her work is rich with symbolism, tension, and transformation and explores the relationships between landscape, the body, time, and memory. Welch creates works that are at once visually beautiful and conceptually challenging.

Growing up in Bathurst as the daughter of an antiques dealer, Welch spent much of her childhood surrounded by antique furniture and decorative objects. She recalls being fascinated as a child by the memories behind objects, the great lengths taken to transport an object to a foreign place in a bid to bring with it a connection to home. This influence of historical objects, particularly those referencing the material culture of the Victorian period can be seen as recurrent themes and visual language in her work. In her early career these influences were explored through processes like printmaking, beading books, lino cutting and fabric printing. In later works these influences intersect with key life events and remain as a personal point of reference for exploration and understanding.

A significant moment in her relationship between landscape and body was falling ill in 2004 and being forced to return from London to her hometown of Bathurst. A tension which revealed itself as a new creative connection to this region, its landscape, ecology and history. Short trips into the landscape around the Central West nurtured Welch both emotionally and physically, allowing her to be drawn out of herself and into the forests, rivers and gorges and connecting her back to her own existence. Since 2012 she has worked primarily in photography and digital media creating images in remote bushland locations, bringing together installation, performance, and site-responsive research to create images that reveal the layered cultural, environmental and personal narratives embedded within place. Here the historical references play a different role, where Welch observes the objects from her past with a new national perspective and contends with the colonial history of Australia.

In 2023 Welch relocated from Bathurst to Hill End where she began to re-visit infrared cameras as a tool to reveal the unseen world that emerges after darkness falls. In her most recent series Unveiling the Night, 2024, Welch has removed herself as body and as photographer, surrendering artistic control to that of the environment. These unique renders of the hidden lives of the Australian bush are revealed as a cinematic exploration beyond image, time and landscape.

Welch has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally. Her work is held in major public and private collections in Australia and internationally, including Art Gallery of Ballarat, Artbank, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Canberra School of Art Collection ANU, Greater Western Area Health Service Health NSW, Harris Farm Markets Collection, Macquarie Group Collection, Manning Regional Art Gallery, Murray Art Museum Albury, National Library of Australia, and Parliament House Art Collection Canberra.

Image: Nicole Welch, Yarrahapinni (still), 2019, single channel HD infrared time lapse, 3:21mins, edition of 3. Courtesy the artist.