Transformations: Image, Time and Landscape

Transformations: Image, Time and 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. 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 Here the historical references play a different role, where Welch observes the objects from her past with a new national perspective and contends with the colonial history of Australia.