NICOLE KELLY FINALIST IN 2026 WYNNE PRIZE AT THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Nicole Kelly is a finalist in the 2026 Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with her painting ‘Bird Hour’.

“I have visited the arid zone of remote Fowlers Gap Research Station in NSW, 110 kilometres north of Broken Hill, continuously for the past six years. Bird hour is an accumulated response to these visits, celebrating the variety of bird life and visually shifting desert landscape. Reflecting on our binding relationships with the landscape and a love of the land, the painting reveals an ongoing attempt to portray reality in a way that liaises not with literal representation but feeling, memory and thought, dispersing familiar representations of the landscape within a field of colour, mark and line.” Nicole Kelly, 2026

‘Bird Hour’ was exhibited with Nicholas Thompson Gallery’s at the Spring1883 Art Fair at the Windsor Hotel, Melbourne in 2025

Nicole Kelly ‘Bird hour’ oil on polyester 116.5 x 107 cm