Clash of Cultures 2006

Summary

Nickolls was an inspirational and influential urban Indigenous artist. He grew up in Adelaide, in the tough Port Adelaide area, but also lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Darwin. He was in Melbourne for several years in the 1980s, an important period in his artistic development when he associated with the ROAR group of artists. Nickolls used the two-faced, split-head motif over a long period in his work which was seen as an expression of the duality of growing up black in a white world. The face, either frontal or in profile, appears thirteen times in this painting. Nickolls use of fine, repeated markings in his drawings and paintings (including this one) acknowledges more traditional Indigenous art making. He worked with leading Northern Territory artists including Rover Thomas, with whom he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale of 1990. Nickolls works often show a complex iconography with many layers of meaning. A major theme in his art is “Dreamtime to Machinetime” a theme which articulates the cultural transition which many Aboriginal people have undertaken in their journey from their traditional cultural heritage of living in the Dreamtime, into the world of mechanisation and technology. Nickolls’ work often presents various interactions between these two different worlds or shows the dilemma of living within both. Subject matter includes the spirituality of the Aboriginal people and their interrelationship to land, sea, sky and cosmos, where people and elements are seen as integrated rather than separate. Nickolls is represented in collections of all of the major art museums and galleries in Australia as well as in collections in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States of America and Canada.