Abstracts Geography

Illuminated landscapes: Beyond the barrier

by Nicole Louise Welch

Illuminated Landscapes: Beyond the barrier reveals the multiple historical paradigms informing our present-day relationship to country. My practice is an investigation and exploration of place, and aims to reveal the multidimensional aspect of landscape when viewed through the historical, cultural and ecological lens. The resulting work documents hybridised site-specific installations that involve the placement of selected historical objects into the landscape and projections onto the terrain, thus illuminating representations of Australia from the past by bringing them into the present. Encoded within the landscapes of my Masters of Fine Art research are the colonial and postcolonial histories of white settlement. The landscape in which the installations take place spans the Great Dividing Range, from the Blue Mountains to Bathurst and south to Albury on the Victorian border. In the bicentennial year of the settlement of Bathurst and the subsequent opening of the eastern interior of Australia, these installations follow the pathways of early exploration. An antique mirror and a chandelier – symbols of history and perception – and descriptive text taken from European explorers’ journals both reflect and emerge from the terrain, resulting in truly incongruous images that record in real time both past and present ideologies. Advisors/Committee Members: George, Phillip, Media Arts, Faculty of Art & Design, UNSW, Cvoro, Uros, Art History & Theory, Faculty of Art & Design, UNSW.