Transformation: the prelude

BRAG presents 'Transformation: the prelude' by Nicole Welch on the OUT THERE Digital Platforms | TAFE Screens, down Ribbon Gang Lane.

Constructed from 1000 photographs of a waterfall captured using infrared technology, the resulting hyperreal light spectrum and colours revealed are invisible to the human eye, symbolically referencing the notion of the unobserved. Water is the central theme in this moving image work, the waterfall is held in a perpetual loop, flowing and then reversing, moving several times faster than it naturally would. Nature has been manipulated and interrupted – the frenetic pace of the water gives the sense that something is about to happen, the stage is set; the scene a tableau.

The use of time-lapse is a way to simultaneously collapse and capture time, engaging the past, present and future in one piece. Waterfall footage is generally slowed down, to create a calm mediative scene, here it has been sped up, a way for the artist to communicate concern about the intense drought that is currently devastating parts of Australia and the region in which she lives, the Central West of New South Wales.