(b Port Adelaide, 1949). Australian painter. His mother was Aboriginal and his father Irish. He began attending occasional local art classes from the age of eight. From 1967 he studied at the South Australian School of Art (Dip. Fine Art Painting, 1970). As a student his work was Western European in style, influence and subjects, but gradually he began to express aspects of his Aboriginal background, particularly contemporary urban dilemmas. Many of his works of the 1970s are introspective, expressing alienation and despair set in a cold, mechanical and confusing industrial urban context (e.g. Childhood Dreaming, 1973/4; see Isaacs, p. 90). In the later 1970s his major theme became ‘machinetime and dreamtime’. His profound sense of the loss of the warmth and depth of traditional Aboriginal society is in contrast with the alienation and aggression he found in industrialized urban life. Nickolls’s meeting with the Aboriginal painter Dinny Nolan in 1979 also had a profound effect on his work. In 1980 Nickolls returned to study at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, before working on a creative arts fellowship at the Australian National University, Canberra. Afterwards he spent an important and formative period, based in Darwin and travelling to outlying Aboriginal communities. In the late 1980s he produced series of Dream Time Landscapes, which reveal a concern for the Australian landscape and its future preservation. In his ‘pop’ portraits he drew upon the work of notable white Australians. Nickolls represented Australia at the Venice Biennale of 1990 and exhibited in international group shows.

• Nickolls, Trevor
  • Aboriginal Australia, §IV, 2: Other contemporary arts