Trevor Nickolls: the Ngarrindjeri painter dubbed the father of urban Aboriginal art
He began drawing at the age of eight in the suburbs of Port Adelaide, the son of a Ngarrindjeri man, and spent his early career working entirely within Western art traditions without having encountered traditional Aboriginal art in any meaningful way. After graduating with a diploma in fine art from the South Australian School of Art in 1972, he worked as an art teacher and began exhibiting. His first solo exhibition, From Dreamtime to Machinetime, was held at Canberra Theatre Centre Gallery in 1977, and the title named a preoccupation that would define the next four decades. Trevor Nickolls was born on 8 June 1949 in Port Adelaide, South Australia. He died on 29 September 2012.
The turning point came in 1979, during postgraduate studies at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, where he met Warlpiri artist Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa, a painter from the Papunya school. The encounter opened a door. Nickolls travelled through the Northern Territory, moved through Arnhem Land, and encountered Aboriginal art not as an academic subject but as a living practice embedded in country. "I was right in it," he said later, "it wraps itself around you, full of spirit, the space, the Dreaming, imagining how it was once." His work changed immediately. The cramped urban tension of his earlier paintings gave way to landscape suffused with mythical presence, and he began incorporating elements of dot painting, cross-hatching and rock art hand stencils alongside the Western imagery and comic-book iconography he had always used.
Working in Melbourne and Sydney through the 1980s, Nickolls developed what he called "Dreamtime to Machinetime": Dreamtime as the harmonious connection to land and ancestral tradition, Machinetime as the alienating force of urban industrialisation. The two collide within a single picture plane, often with dark humour. A Rainbow Serpent contorts into the shape of a dollar sign. A tree of life becomes currency. Urban towers swallow lone figures. The paintings are at once satirical and despairing, autobiographical and universal. Artist Brenda L Croft later called him the "father of urban Aboriginal art."
In 1990 Nickolls was selected alongside Kimberley painter Rover Thomas to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, the first Aboriginal artists to do so. He showed a suite of thirty paintings. Critical recognition followed: a major survey exhibition toured Australia in 2009-10, he was a finalist in the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the NGV in 2009, and in 2013 he posthumously won the Blake Prize for religious art. His work is held in all Australian state galleries and in public collections in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and Canada. The signature work Dreamtime Machinetime is in the NGA collection.
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