Image: Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery will present ‘Transformations: Image, Time & Landscape’, a mid-career survey of Hill End-based artist Nicole Welch, from 29 August to 1 November 2026. Curated by Richard Perram OAM and installed in the gallery’s Main Gallery, the exhibition is described by BRAG as tracing 27 years of work across mediums and focusing on Welch’s ongoing exploration of the relationships between landscape, the body, time and memory.
The gallery’s announcement situates Welch’s practice in Bathurst as well as in the Central West more broadly. Welch grew up in Bathurst as the daughter of an antiques dealer, and BRAG says she spent much of her childhood among antique furniture and decorative objects. That early proximity to historical objects, especially material culture associated with the Victorian period, has remained a recurring influence in her work. According to the gallery, those references first appeared through printmaking, beading books, lino cutting and fabric printing, then continued to inform later work as her practice developed.
BRAG highlights a pivotal personal and artistic shift in 2004, when Welch fell ill and returned from London to Bathurst. The gallery says that experience changed her relationship to landscape and prompted a renewed connection to the region’s ecology and history. Short trips into the Central West landscape, BRAG states, helped sustain her physically and emotionally, drawing her into forests, rivers and gorges and back toward her sense of self. Since 2012, Welch has worked primarily in photography and digital media, making images in remote bushland locations and combining installation, performance and site-responsive research.
The exhibition text also frames Welch’s use of historical references as something that has evolved over time. In earlier work, those references were linked to the memories and material culture of objects from her past. In later works, BRAG says, they intersect with key life events and take on a wider perspective, including a confrontation with Australia’s colonial history. That tension between intimate memory and broader historical context sits at the centre of the survey as the gallery presents it.
Another turning point came in 2023, when Welch relocated from Bathurst to Hill End and returned to infrared cameras as a way of revealing what emerges after dark. BRAG says her most recent series, ‘Unveiling the Night’, made in 2024, marks a further reduction of the artist’s own presence in the image-making process: she has removed herself as both body and photographer, surrendering artistic control to the environment. The gallery describes the resulting works as cinematic renderings of the hidden lives of the Australian bush.
The exhibition page also identifies a 2019 work, ‘Yarrahapinni’, as the image accompanying the show. It is listed as a single-channel HD infrared time-lapse work, running 3:21 minutes and made in an edition of three. The site says Welch has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally, and that her work is held in several public and private collections, including Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Artbank, Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, the National Library of Australia and Parliament House Art Collection Canberra.
‘Transformations: Image, Time & Landscape’ opens on Friday 28 August at 6pm, with the exhibition running free of charge from 29 August to 1 November 2026. BRAG also lists a panel discussion for Saturday 29 August at 11am featuring BRAG director Amanda Crews, Welch and Perram.
