Nicole Welch LAND Works

LAND INSTALLATIONS 2012 - 2020

Nicole Welch’s artistic process involves traversing through areas of bushland, where she locates historically and environmentally significant landscapes to create compositions using large-scale projectors, generators, spotlights and research-inspired objects. Her LAND installations are enacted and recorded in situ, resulting in a truly incongruous image that records in real time both past and present ideologies.

“I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia on which I have made this work and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.” – Nicole Welch

NICOLE WELCH - ILLUMINATION 2012

The Illumination works are photographs of site-specific installations in the Australian landscape. The works began when I was artist in residence at Hill End in 2010. The archetypal Australian landscape of Hill End that I encountered was overwhelmingly felt, along with the colonial histories imbued within. My ancestry is strongly connected to this region dating to pre - 1850 when they arrived to secure pastoral leases on an ‘uncharted’ land. These personal family stories, the broader history of the region and the European idealism projected upon this landscape became the focus of this new work. ‘Perhaps at first glance Welch’s landscapes appear innocent, seductive even. But behind the brooding forest, misty skies and the thick of fog, the vanishing points of colonial histories await our attention’ Veronica Tello Anachronism, Romanticism and the Australian Landscape Today: Nicole Welch’s Illuminations (2012)