Nicole Chaffey is a Newcastle based artist with an established studio practice spanning over ten years. Drawing on a deep connection to Country through her Biripai/Gadigal heritage, she seeks to describe her relationship to the Australian landscape by occupying a space between representation and abstraction, where the visible, known world can diffuse into one of spirituality and old knowledge.

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The importance of recognising where one belongs is important to Chaffey’s practice of art making. Almost always based within the stories of her family, particularly her Aboriginal grandfather, she seeks out a place where the old history can be acknowledged, and the inheritance of an essential and dependent relationship with the land can be honoured.

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Her landscapes focus the formalistic; line, colour, form, balance; whilst investigating an elemental relationship in pigment and wax that mirrors her own personal history. They explore the connections between landscape and human experience, memory and distance, and the internal and external connections to the way we live, react, interact and connect to our environment.

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Chaffey has exhibited throughout Australia, and has been included in major exhibitions at Glasshouse Port Macquarie and Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery. Her work is represented in public and private collections worldwide.

She completed a Masters of Philosophy (Aboriginal Studies) in 2015 for which she received a Research Higher Excellence Award from the University of Newcastle. She was awarded the major prize at the Wollotuka Acquisitive Art Prize in 2011 and was a finalist in the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize in 2013 and the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship in 2008.

 

Nicole has a well established studio practice in the Newcastle suburb of Georgetown.