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Nicole Welch’s move from Bathurst to London in late 2002 was driven by curiosity rather than a career plan. “I just had this curiosity to see the architecture and the art, and to experience all of the things that I'd learned about,” she says of her immersion in the bohemian scene there. Two works from that visit have stayed with her: a Tate Modern video of a bowl of fruit slowly decaying, and Picasso's 'Guernica' in Spain. “Such a powerful work,” she says. Scotland's landscape left its own mark too. “The Highlands are very imposing, and the weather there as well is really emotive,” she says.
Then, in 2004, everything stopped. Welch was diagnosed with lupus nephritis, a serious kidney-involving form of the autoimmune disease. “I was diagnosed on a Friday afternoon, and I was on a plane on the Monday,” she says. The prognosis was poor and the treatment, oral chemotherapy; Welch, 29 and freshly home, was left to work out what came next.
Paradoxically, illness made room for her art. Too unwell to work full-time, she found herself with time on her hands for the first time in years, and started making work again. “It opened the door for me to start making, and it also gave me the focus of, well, how do I want to spend my time on this planet?”
Now 27 years into her career, Welch is the subject of a mid-career survey — odd terminology, she admits, for an artist with no real idea how long her career, or her life, has left to run.
“It feels like mid-career, not mid-life,” she clarifies. The survey draws on work going back to 1999, but Welch doesn't feel she came into her own until her ‘Illumination’ series, made between 2010 and 2012. The shift wasn't a change in technique so much as subject: it arrived when she realised she wanted to make work about the place she was actually in — the Central West, its landscape and its history.
Growing up in Bathurst, her mother was an antiques dealer with a barn behind the family home that doubled as a cabinetmakers' workshop; her father ran a panel-beating business. “Both of my parents were always doing things, always fixing things, repairing things, working with tools,” Welch says. With both parents absorbed in running businesses she and her two older brothers were largely left to their own devices. “We were totally free-range, and, you know, unsupervised,” she says. “So much creative thinking and imagination” grew out of it, much of it spent camping near Hill End or swimming at local waterholes.
Her first ambition wasn't art, it was to become a national parks and wildlife ranger, a plan that lasted until she turned 13. But by high school, at Kelso High, art had taken over. Four years at the Canberra School of Art at the ANU was rounded off by a Diploma of Education, which she carried across to the United Kingdom to teach.
Being a nature-lover, she has never really been able to make art in cities. Following her unexpected return to Australia, two residencies at Hill End, run through the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, eventually drew Welch to settle there with her husband, Ross McDonald. The town carries real artistic pedigree — Donald Friend lived there in the 1940s, while Russell Drysdale, Brett Whiteley and Margaret Olley have all visited. “It kind of normalises creativity here,” she says of today's arty community.
The bushland behind her Hill End home fed directly into ‘Unveiling the Night’, her series of movement-triggered infrared photographs. “I couldn't believe the amount of wildlife here,” she says — native and introduced species alike, passing through what is essentially her backyard. Setting the project up took nerve as much as equipment. “I had this idea of what it could be, but I also had this idea that it could actually just not work at all... there was a couple of months of real trepidation.” Once the cameras were out, she learned as she went, reading animal behaviour to work out where and when to place them.
Welch's ‘Body’ series, self-portraits with a skeleton painted over her nude figure, began as an idea during a 2010 Hill End residency, not long after a bruising stretch of illness. “I just had this sense of wanting to run from that experience, and the idea of mortality and death,” she says. The first photographs, taken six months later, doubled as a meditation on the district's harsh colonial history. A moving version followed in 2018, commissioned by Bathurst's Art State festival, with Hill End painter Genevieve Carroll painting the skeleton itself.
Welch is precise about what such ‘memento mori’ (Latin for "remember you must die”) means to her — not morbidity, but responsibility. “The idea of the memento mori, I think, is just to be mindful of your impact and contribution through life,” she says, describing the alternative as forgetting that "you are going to spin off the wheel of life" one day.
The survey is a true retrospective, curated by Richard Perram OAM, former director of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, drawing on Welch's work from 1999 to 2024. Asked to pick a standout piece, she can't. “I feel really connected to all of them,” she says. “They mark a different period in time, and I remember exactly the day that I made it.”
So what keeps her going creatively, twenty-seven years on? “All I know is that when I have had periods where I'm not making art, or I'm not thinking about making art, I feel very confused by life,” she says. Making work leaves her grounded, with a clearer lens on the world. “I think art is like a gateway drug,” she says. “Once you start... you actually can't stop, and when you do, you feel very dissatisfied with life.”
'Transformations: Image, Time & Landscape. Nicole Welch: A Mid-Career Survey' is on exhibition November 1, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery.
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