The paintings of Trevor Nickolls are full of collisions.
The natural world meets the machine.
The city meets Country.
Rainbow Serpents move beside factories, television screens, money signs, buildings, and trapped human figures. Dots and cross-hatching appear alongside cartoons, surrealism, portraiture, and imagery drawn from popular culture.
Nickolls developed the phrase Dreamtime–Machinetime to describe this tension.
On one side was a world grounded in spiritual connection, Country, and relationships between people and nature.
On the other was an industrialised world of technology, consumption, isolation, and environmental disruption.
Rather than keep these worlds apart, Trevor Nickolls placed them within the same painting.
The conflict became his subject.
Who was Trevor Nickolls?
Trevor Nickolls was born in Adelaide in 1949 and was a Ngarrindjeri artist.
The Art Gallery of South Australia identifies him with the Ngarrindjeri people of South Australia, while Art Leven records a career extending from early exhibitions in the 1970s until his death in 2012. (agsa.sa.gov.au) (artleven.com)
Unlike artists whose practices developed within remote community art movements, Nickolls grew up in suburban Adelaide and received formal training within Western art institutions.
He studied at the South Australian School of Art and later completed postgraduate studies in painting at the Victorian College of the Arts.
This placed him in an unusual position.
Nickolls knew the visual language and history of Western contemporary art.
At the same time, he was increasingly exploring his own First Nations heritage.
His practice developed in the space between those worlds.
Growing up in the city
Urban experience was fundamental to Trevor Nickolls’s art.
He grew up within a suburban environment rather than on remote Country.
Factories.
Roads.
Television.
Advertising.
Housing.
Technology.
Consumer culture.
These elements became part of the visual world from which he worked.
Nickolls did not accept the idea that First Nations art had to come from a remote community or reproduce a recognised regional style.
His own experience was urban.
So the city became legitimate cultural material.
An early interest in drawing
Art Leven records that Nickolls began drawing and painting from around the age of eight. (artleven.com)
That early interest eventually led to formal art training and work as an art teacher.
His education exposed him to Western painting traditions, including modernism, surrealism, portraiture, abstraction, illustration, and other contemporary approaches.
Rather than reject this training, Nickolls later combined it with First Nations visual knowledge.
The tension between traditions became productive.
Dreamtime–Machinetime
The central concept in Trevor Nickolls’s work is Dreamtime–Machinetime.
Art Leven records that he began exhibiting works under this idea in the late 1970s, including the 1978 exhibition From Dreamtime to Machinetime. (artleven.com)
The Art Gallery of South Australia holds Dreamtime machinetime, 1979, one of the key early works associated with the theme. (agsa.sa.gov.au)
The idea provided Nickolls with a framework through which many different concerns could meet.
Culture.
Technology.
Environment.
Identity.
Spirituality.
Urbanisation.
Consumerism.
Isolation.
The painting becomes the place where these forces collide.
What does Machinetime mean?
For Nickolls, Machinetime represented more than technology itself.
It concerned a society increasingly dominated by machines, consumption, artificial environments, and separation from the natural world.
Art Leven describes Nickolls’s Machinetime imagery as a cramped technological environment in which isolated people become trapped within buildings and connected to machines while growing increasingly estranged from one another and the earth. (artleven.com)
Televisions appear.
Buildings crowd the surface.
Faces become imprisoned.
Machines seem to consume people.
The city becomes psychologically claustrophobic.
What does Dreamtime mean in Nickolls’s work?
Against Machinetime, Nickolls positioned Dreamtime as a different relationship with the world.
Nature.
Country.
Spirit.
Community.
Cultural continuity.
Art Leven describes this aspect of his work as connected with the idea that relationship with nature provides spiritual sustenance and supports human dignity. (artleven.com)
The contrast should not be understood simply as past versus present.
Nickolls was a contemporary urban artist.
Dreamtime was not nostalgia for a world that had disappeared.
It represented another way of understanding how people might live within the present.
Two worlds on one canvas
Some of Nickolls’s strongest paintings place Dreamtime and Machinetime directly beside one another.
One side may be dense.
Mechanical.
Urban.
Restricted.
The other becomes open.
Natural.
Spiritual.
Bright.
The contrast can occur through imagery, but also through the structure of the painting.
Colour changes.
Space changes.
Patterns change.
The canvas itself becomes divided between competing ways of living.
The Garden of Eden
The Garden of Eden, 1982, is among Trevor Nickolls’s significant early works and is held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. (artgallery.nsw.gov.au)
The idea of a garden allowed Nickolls to explore an environment in which humans, plants, animals, and spiritual forces exist within a connected system.
This contrasts sharply with his images of urban isolation.
The natural world is not background decoration.
It becomes an alternative social and spiritual structure.
Encountering Papunya painting
A major development in Nickolls’s practice came through his contact with First Nations artists working within other cultural traditions.
Art Leven identifies his meeting with Papunya artist Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa in Melbourne in 1979 as a turning point. (artleven.com)
At the time, Nickolls was completing postgraduate studies at the Victorian College of the Arts.
The encounter gave him direct experience of an artistic tradition grounded in Country, ceremony, and cultural knowledge but expressed through contemporary painting materials.
For Nickolls, this demonstrated that different artistic systems could exist within the same contemporary field.
Learning without imitation
The influence of Papunya painting did not mean Trevor Nickolls became a Western Desert painter.
He did not have cultural authority over the stories or designs belonging to those artists.
Instead, the encounter expanded his understanding of what contemporary First Nations art could be.
Art Leven records his interest in dotting and the way older techniques could create complex, dynamic visual fields. (artleven.com)
Nickolls adapted what he learned within his own artistic language.
His subjects remained connected with urban identity, cultural conflict, spirituality, and contemporary society.
Arnhem Land
Nickolls’s later work as an education officer gave him opportunities to travel through Arnhem Land and meet artists and Elders.
Art Leven describes this experience as another important shift, allowing him to see rock paintings in Country and engage more directly with First Nations relationships to land. (artleven.com)
His paintings subsequently incorporated stronger references to natural environments and spiritual relationships.
Figures.
Trees.
Animals.
Waterholes.
These elements became part of compositions that felt more open than the compressed urban imagery of his earlier Machinetime works.
Rarrk and surface
Nickolls also incorporated visual references to rarrk, the cross-hatching associated with painting traditions in Arnhem Land.
Within his work, rarrk sits beside dotting, cartoon-like figures, geometric forms, and symbols from contemporary urban life.
This combination is characteristic of his practice.
Different visual systems do not disappear into one another.
Their differences remain visible.
The painting becomes a site of negotiation.
A hybrid visual language
Trevor Nickolls developed a visual language that resisted classification.
It could include:
Dotting.
Cross-hatching.
Rainbow Serpents.
Self-portraits.
Skyscrapers.
Machines.
Roads.
Televisions.
Cartoon imagery.
Corporate symbols.
Animals.
Plants.
Money.
The sun.
These elements could coexist within one composition.
Nickolls did not treat Western and First Nations imagery as mutually exclusive.
His own life already existed across both contexts.
The Rainbow Serpent
The Rainbow Serpent is among the recurring First Nations symbols in Nickolls’s work.
Its appearance creates a strong contrast with the industrial imagery surrounding it.
In some compositions, the serpent interacts directly with contemporary signs and symbols.
Art Leven notes instances in which Rainbow Serpent imagery transforms into the shape of a dollar sign, bringing spiritual and economic systems into direct confrontation. (artleven.com)
The transformation is typical of Nickolls.
One symbol becomes another.
Meaning shifts.
The collision creates satire.
Humour and satire
Nickolls’s paintings can address difficult subjects, but humour runs throughout the work.
Buildings acquire mouths.
Machines become creatures.
People become trapped inside bizarre technological environments.
Corporate signs become part of spiritual landscapes.
The humour does not reduce the seriousness of the subject.
It allows Nickolls to expose absurdity.
A system that appears normal becomes strange when represented through his visual language.
The city as psychological landscape
Nickolls frequently painted the city as something more than architecture.
Buildings can become psychological structures.
Windows resemble cells.
People appear trapped.
Televisions isolate individuals.
Mechanical shapes crowd around human figures.
The city becomes a state of mind.
This gives Nickolls’s urban imagery an autobiographical dimension.
Dreamtime–Machinetime is not only a social theory.
It is also a conflict experienced by the artist.
Encapsulation
One concept that emerged early in Trevor Nickolls’s work was Encapsulation.
Art Leven traces the theme back to his art-school period in the 1960s and connects it with alienation within industrialised urban life. (artleven.com)
The word describes many of his figures well.
People appear boxed in.
Contained.
Surrounded by technology.
Separated from open space.
The image becomes a metaphor for psychological and cultural restriction.
Self-portraiture
Trevor Nickolls repeatedly painted himself.
These self-portraits provide another way of understanding Dreamtime–Machinetime.
Rather than present the cultural conflict as something happening to other people, Nickolls placed himself inside it.
His face becomes part of the urban environment.
Part of spiritual imagery.
Part of satire.
Art Leven describes his recurring self-portraits as charting changes in both his artistic language and his own fears and desires. (artleven.com)
The social becomes personal.
Aboriginality and identity
Nickolls emerged during a period when First Nations artists working in cities were gaining greater visibility.
Museums and the art market had often treated First Nations art primarily through remote or ethnographic contexts.
Nickolls challenged that assumption.
He was urban.
Formally trained.
Interested in contemporary art theory.
Connected with Ngarrindjeri heritage.
And unwilling to reduce any of these aspects of his identity.
The Potter Museum’s 2009 survey described him as a pioneering figure in a generation of First Nations artists seeking a new position within mainstream art and culture. (potter-museum.unimelb.edu.au)
The rise of urban First Nations art
Trevor Nickolls is frequently described as a pioneering figure in urban First Nations art.
The Potter Museum survey described his work as fundamental to questions of identity and Aboriginality and recognised his role in expanding the position of First Nations artists within contemporary art. (potter-museum.unimelb.edu.au)
His influence can also be seen in later generations.
Artist Vernon Ah Kee has identified Nickolls as one of the artists who helped him understand what being a contemporary First Nations artist could mean. (artgallery.nsw.gov.au)
Nickolls helped open a field in which cultural identity did not determine one permitted visual style.
Painting social and political issues
Nickolls often resisted the idea that his work could be reduced to direct political illustration.
Yet contemporary social issues appear throughout his career.
Art Leven records subjects including the Stolen Generations, deaths in custody, the Maralinga atomic tests, child exploitation, the Republic, and corporate branding. (artleven.com)
The Art Gallery of South Australia likewise notes that his later work addressed enforced Western religion, the Stolen Generations, atomic testing, and First Nations deaths in custody. (agsa.sa.gov.au)
Nickolls rarely presented these subjects as straightforward reportage.
They entered his symbolic world.
Deaths in custody
First Nations deaths in custody became one of the themes within Nickolls’s work.
The National Gallery’s 1994 exhibition Urban Focus specifically identified his painting as addressing deaths in custody alongside other contemporary First Nations artists confronting the effects of colonisation and assimilation. (nga.gov.au)
In Nickolls’s visual language, such political realities could become part of the broader Machinetime system.
Institutions.
Confinement.
Technology.
Control.
Alienation.
Individual subjects connect to a larger critique.
Maralinga
The atomic testing conducted at Maralinga in South Australia also entered Nickolls’s work.
For a South Australian Ngarrindjeri artist concerned with technology and its relationship with nature, the subject fitted directly within the logic of Machinetime.
Advanced technology promised progress.
Its consequences included environmental damage and devastating impacts on First Nations people.
Nickolls’s imagery could therefore treat the machine as both achievement and threat.
Corporate branding and consumption
Consumer culture also appears within Nickolls’s paintings.
Logos.
Money.
Products.
Advertising.
These symbols belong naturally within Machinetime.
They show how contemporary identity can become organised around consumption.
The visual language of branding enters the same painting as ancestral symbolism.
The contrast asks what modern society values and what it sacrifices.
Environmental concerns
Environmental anxiety runs throughout Dreamtime–Machinetime.
Nickolls repeatedly contrasts a world of spiritual and ecological relationship with one dominated by technological development.
This makes his work particularly relevant beyond the decades in which it was made.
Industrialisation.
Environmental degradation.
Consumption.
Urban isolation.
Dependence on technology.
These concerns have not disappeared.
The paintings continue to speak to them.
Roving in Thomas Town
Nickolls’s relationship with Rover Joolama Thomas became another important point of connection in his career.
Art Leven identifies Roving in Thomas Town, 1994, as a significant work and records his continuing engagement with Thomas and East Kimberley painting. (artleven.com)
The title itself suggests movement between artistic worlds.
Nickolls was interested in artists whose cultural and geographic experiences differed profoundly from his own.
The exchange did not require their work to become alike.
Venice Biennale 1990
In 1990, Trevor Nickolls and Rover Joolama Thomas represented “Australia” at the 44th Venice Biennale.
The National Gallery of Victoria identifies them as the first First Nations artists to represent the country at the Venice Biennale. (ngv.vic.gov.au)
The pairing was particularly significant.
Thomas was associated with the East Kimberley ochre painting movement.
Nickolls came from an urban, formally trained, highly hybrid contemporary practice.
Together, their work demonstrated the inadequacy of treating First Nations art as a single visual category.
There was no one First Nations contemporary style.
Thirty paintings in Venice
Art Leven records that Nickolls presented 30 paintings at the 1990 Venice Biennale. (artleven.com)
The presentation brought his Dreamtime–Machinetime imagery into one of the most prominent international contemporary art contexts.
This was important not simply as recognition of one artist.
It positioned an urban First Nations practice within international contemporary art at a time when institutional definitions were still changing rapidly.
The significance of the Venice pairing
Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls came from very different artistic contexts.
Thomas worked with natural earth pigment and Country in the East Kimberley.
Nickolls combined urban imagery, modern painting, satire, First Nations symbolism, and autobiography.
The difference between them was the point.
Their joint presentation demonstrated the breadth of First Nations artistic experience.
Country could produce one language.
The city another.
Both belonged in Venice.
Other Side Art
In 2009, the Potter Museum of Art presented Other Side Art: Trevor Nickolls, a Survey of Paintings and Drawings 1972–2007.
It was the first museum survey devoted to his work and brought together more than 50 paintings and drawings spanning over three decades. (potter-museum.unimelb.edu.au)
The exhibition examined recurring relationships in his practice.
Human psychology and politics.
City and landscape.
Spiritual and material worlds.
Harmony and conflict.
These oppositions had defined his work from the beginning.
A changing visual language
Nickolls’s painting did not remain stylistically fixed.
Art Leven records a noticeable reduction in visual complexity during the early and mid-2000s. Dense fields of imagery gave way to quieter compositions containing isolated forms such as a boomerang or spear thrower against sparse fields. (artleven.com)
The change demonstrates that Dreamtime–Machinetime was not a rigid stylistic formula.
Nickolls continued to reconsider how much information a painting required.
A busy city could convey conflict.
So could one isolated form.
Later paintings
Later works could again become complex.
Layering returned.
Symbols accumulated.
Earlier themes reappeared in new forms.
The movement between density and restraint mirrors the larger structure of Nickolls’s career.
Harmony and disharmony.
Open and enclosed.
Quiet and crowded.
Dreamtime and Machinetime.
The tension never fully disappears.
Brush with the Lore
A significant late work, Brush with the Lore, 2010, is held by the Art Gallery of South Australia.
AGSA describes the painting as bringing together multiple legal and cultural systems First Nations people have been required to navigate, alongside references to imposed Christianity, the Stolen Generations, Maralinga atomic testing, and deaths in custody. (agsa.sa.gov.au)
The work demonstrates how Nickolls’s symbolic language remained politically and culturally engaged near the end of his career.
The imagery had changed.
The central conflict had not.
Looking at a Trevor Nickolls painting
A Trevor Nickolls painting often rewards slow looking.
At first, it can seem crowded.
Dots.
Buildings.
Faces.
Animals.
Lines.
Machines.
Symbols.
Then relationships emerge.
A serpent becomes money.
A face becomes trapped within architecture.
Nature appears against technology.
A self-portrait becomes part of a broader social argument.
The painting operates through accumulation.
Meaning appears between symbols rather than within any one motif.
The continuing relevance of Machinetime
Dreamtime–Machinetime was developed in the 1970s and 1980s, but its underlying questions remain strikingly contemporary.
How does technology shape human relationships?
What happens when economic systems dominate environmental ones?
Can modern urban life sustain cultural and spiritual connection?
What is lost when people become detached from Country?
Nickolls did not provide simple answers.
He created a visual system through which the questions could remain active.
The legacy of Trevor Nickolls
Trevor Nickolls died in 2012 after a career extending across four decades.
His significance lies partly in timing.
He emerged when the institutional category of contemporary First Nations art was still being transformed.
But longevity alone does not explain his importance.
Nickolls created a visual language uniquely suited to his experience.
Ngarrindjeri identity.
Suburban Adelaide.
Art-school training.
Papunya painting.
Arnhem Land.
The city.
Popular culture.
Technology.
Country.
Self-portraiture.
Social critique.
These influences were not resolved into a single harmonious identity.
The tension remained visible.
That was the point.
Dreamtime and Machinetime occupy the same canvas because both occupied Trevor Nickolls’s world.
Discover Trevor Nickolls at Art Leven
Art Leven (formerly Cooee Art) has handled works by Trevor Nickolls across different periods of his career, including paintings associated with his distinctive Dreamtime–Machinetime visual language and his exploration of urban life, identity, spirituality, and contemporary society.
Explore available and previously handled artworks, biographical information, exhibitions, collections, and market history on the Trevor Nickolls artist profile.
The profile currently includes Untitled, 1991, alongside an extensive exhibition history spanning the emergence of Dreamtime–Machinetime in the 1970s, the 1990 Venice Biennale, and the later Other Side Art museum survey. (artleven.com)