Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) celebrates the breadth of creativity in our own backyard this
Spring with two new exhibitions by Central West NSW artists.
In the Main Gallery, a mid-career survey by Hill-End-based Nicole Welch, Transformations: Image, Time & Landscape, surveys 27 years of practice exploring relationships between landscape, the body, and memory. In the Foyer Gallery, Five Decades: Studies in Realism by Bathurst-based Graham Lupp presents an exclusive look at studies made by the artist during formative moments of his expansive career. Plus: our vibrant display of visitor-made artworks in Made by You has been extended across our OUT THERE Digital Platforms | TAFE Screens until summer.
Transformations: Image, Time & Landscape
Nicole Welch: A Mid-Career Survey
29 August – 1 November 2026 | Opening Friday 28 August, 6pm – RSVP essential
Curated by Richard Perram OAM
Transformations: Image, Time & Landscape surveys 27 years of work by Hill End-based artist Nicole Welch. Throughout her career and across mediums, the artist’s 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.
Growing up in Bathurst as the daughter of an antiques dealer, Welch spent much of her childhood surrounded by antique furniture and decorative objects. She recalls being fascinated as a child by the memories behind objects, the great lengths taken to transport an object to a foreign place in a bid to bring with it a connection to home. This influence of historical objects, particularly those referencing the material culture of the Victorian period, can be seen as recurrent themes and visual language in her work.
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.
In 2023, Welch relocated from Bathurst to Hill End, where she began to revisit infrared cameras as a tool to reveal the unseen world that emerges after darkness falls. In her most recent series Unveiling the Night, 2024, Welch has removed herself as body and as photographer, surrendering artistic control to that of the environment. These unique renders of the hidden lives of the Australian bush are revealed as a cinematic exploration beyond image, time and landscape.
Five Decades: Studies in Realism
Graham Lupp
29 August – 1 November 2026 | Opening Friday 28 August, 6pm – RSVP essential
Five Decades presents a small survey of personal work and invites us into the private collection of local artist Graham Lupp, providing a unique glimpse of studies made during formative moments and experiences of the artist’s life. The exhibition offers a beautiful journey of reflection, retrospection and poignant perspectives, celebrating vulnerability and wisdom across five decades of practice.
Realism has always been central to Lupp’s work, starting in the 70s as an art student in London and has evolved through the years as playful encounters. Extensive travel in the 90s inspired a new aesthetic — blending images of new experiences overseas with more familiar subjects, mostly landscapes, derived from the Bathurst region. Apart from years of studying architecture in Sydney and fine art in London, Lupp has lived continuously in his hometown of Bathurst and developed a lifelong passion for the landscape of the district and has dedicated himself to its meticulous study. In later years this aesthetic has slowly given way to a more expressive approach, in an endeavour to understand the sublime through a deep-seated emotional connection to a childhood spent in the Australian bush.
Five decades is a journey through practice, viewed from a vantage point of five decades. Many of these studies have led to larger paintings now held in major public and private collections, but for Lupp these studies are of the greatest value.
Made by You
OUT THERE Digital Platforms | TAFE Screens
Extended to Summer!
Made by You gives back to our vibrant community with a digital display of visitor-made artworks on BRAG’s Digital Platforms: TAFE Screens.
The BRAG Maker Space is a dedicated room in the Gallery for visitors to get creative, further their learning, and engage deeper with exhibition themes. Since February 2024, BRAG has seen thousands of visitor-made artworks take over our Maker Space walls.
During each exhibition suite, the Maker Space contains resources for all ages about the current exhibition, and visitors are asked to create an artwork responding to an exhibition-related prompt. Materials are provided, and visitors are encouraged to add their finished artwork to a common wall – which over the duration of the exhibition forms a large-scale community-made artwork.
Made by You stitches together over 1,200 scans of these visitor-made artworks to form a new video collage, celebrating the incredibly creative and invaluable contributions our visitors make to the BRAG community.
