Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) is excited to announce our Summer Exhibitions, opening
Friday 21 November 2025 at 6pm – RSVP essential.
This Summer, BRAG champions regional artists who live and work across Wiradjuri Country in
Central West NSW with five new exhibitions. In the Main Gallery, West of Central 2 showcases work
by 16 regional artists responding to ecologies, histories, and communities of the Central West.
Sharing that space, the 2025 Our Ngurang (Home) Program Exhibition reveals what students have
learned over a year-long Wiradyuri Art Education Program. In BRAG’s Foyer Gallery, Bella Fenton,
winner of the 2023 Bathurst Grange Distillery X BRAG Summer Gin Art Competition, presents The
Bogeyman. On the OUT THERE | Forecourt Projection, Charles Sturt University’s Children’s Voices
Centre shares the global Children Draw Health project; and downtown on the OUT THERE | TAFE
Screens, Nicole Welch presents Transformation: The Prelude.
West of Central 2
Main Gallery, 22 November – 25 January 2026
Curator & Artist Talk, Saturday 22 November, 11am – RSVP essential.
Conceived as an exhibition responding to place, West of Central embraces artists who live and work
across Wiradjuri Country in Central West NSW.
This Earth-centric exhibition honours artists’ care, concern, and respect for Country. Home to an
increasing cohort of contemporary artists seeking connection, respite and balance, regional Australia
is a place where artists have space to create, experiment and challenge. West of Central celebrates
those who live and work regionally, positioning the regional as central to their practice.
First realised at BRAG in 2023, this second chapter, West of Central 2, invited artists from LGAs of
Lachlan, Parkes, Forbes, Weddin, Cabonne, Cowra, Blayney, Orange, Mid-Western, Bathurst, Oberon
and Lithgow to respond to the ecologies, histories, and communities of these places.
Artists: Adam Rish (Hill End), Gabrielle Bates (Kandos), Genevieve Carroll (Hill End), Graham Lupp
(Bathurst), Gus Armstrong & Peter Swain (Kandos), Jonathan Jones (Bathurst), Laura Baker
(Blayney), Nicola Mason (Napoleon Reef), Ros Auld (Borenore), Simone Darcy (Forbes), Steven
Cavanagh (Hill End), Susan Baird (Hill End), the artHITects (Gary Carsley & Renjie Teoh) (Bathurst),
Vicky Browne (Nullo Mountain).
Our Ngurang (Home) Program Exhibition
Main Gallery, 22 November – 25 January 2026
In 2025, BRAG partnered with Wiradyuri Elders, Artists, and Community to develop and deliver the
Our Ngurang (Home) Program – an education program for students and teachers across Wiradyuri
County in the Bathurst Region.
With a local focus on our shared home of Wiradyuri Country, students from Blayney Public School
participated in a year-long learning program of art, culture, and language workshops with
Wiradyuri/Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones, Wiradyuri Elder Wirribee Aunty Leanna Carr, Wiradyuri
artist Jessica Leffley, and Yiri Sue Rice.
Students learned about Country, Wiradyuri Lore, and art made by contemporary Wiradyuri artists.
Each student chose a native totem animal that they best align with and explored what they can do
individually to protect our rivers and environment to protect these animals. Students’ learnings are
shared in their body of work on display in the 2025 Our Ngurang (Home) Program Exhibition.
Bella Fenton: The Bogeyman
Foyer Gallery, 22 November – 25 January 2026
In 2023, Bella Fenton won the Bathurst Grange Distillery (BGD) x BRAG Summer Gin Art
Competition. Her artwork was reproduced on the BGD Summer Gin labels of that year, and Fenton
was awarded a BRAG Foyer Gallery exhibition – an opportunity for a local emerging artist to present
their artwork to a wide audience in a professionally staffed, celebrated Regional Gallery.
Image: Bella Fenton, Exactly as I left it, acrylic on canvas, 33 x 43 cm. Courtesy the artist.
“My series of paintings, The Bogeyman, explores the strangeness of nightmares and the shifting
sense of identity that comes with living through these unreal timelines. Through recurring characters,
the works form a twisting, disordered narrative in which a cowgirl becomes trapped in a world of
horror drawn from both movies and everyday anxieties. The settings feel familiar yet slightly off,
evoking unease and a dark, almost absurd humour as if things couldn’t possibly get any worse.”
The Bogeyman will be displayed in the BRAG Foyer Gallery, located in the Foyer of the Gallery and
Library building.
Children’s Voices Centre: Children Draw Health
OUT THERE Digital Platforms | Forecourt Projection, 22 November – 25 January 2026
The Children’s Voices Centre is a Charles Sturt University Research Centre that conducts worldleading, transformative interdisciplinary research with, for and about children. It creates opportunities
for all children to express their perspectives, share their knowledge, and be listened to with respect
and action.
The Children Draw Health project invited children from across the world to draw or create a picture of
their perspectives about health and healthcare, then answer a few quick questions to describe their
creation. 126 drawings by children from 18 countries (Australia, Botswana, Canada, Croatia, Denmark,
Faroe Islands, Hungary, Iceland, India, Iran, Kenya, Malta, Netherlands, Rwanda, Thailand, Uganda,
United Kingdom, United States) were received in response to the prompts: What makes you healthy?
Who helps you be healthy? Where do you go to get healthier? What would your ideal hospital or health
service look like?
In 2025 the Children’s Voices Centre presented this research at the 76th Session of the World Health
Organization Regional Committee for the Western Pacific (RCM76) in Nadi, Fiji.
At BRAG, Children Draw Health will be visible after dark in the Gallery/Library Forecourt, showcasing
the incredibly insightful drawings and responses by children from Bathurst and around the world.
Nicole Welch: Transformation: The Prelude
OUT THERE Digital Platforms | TAFE Screens, 22 November – 25 January 2026
Constructed from 1000 photographs of a waterfall captured using infrared technology, the resulting
hyperreal light spectrum and colours revealed are invisible to the human eye, symbolically
referencing the notion of the unobserved. Water is the central theme in this moving image work, the
waterfall is held in a perpetual loop, flowing and then reversing, moving several times faster than it
naturally would. Nature has been manipulated and interrupted – the frenetic pace of the water gives
the sense that something is about to happen, the stage is set; the scene a tableau.
The use of time-lapse is a way to simultaneously collapse and capture time, engaging the past,
present and future in one piece. Waterfall footage is generally slowed down, to create a calm
mediative scene, here it has been sped up, a way for the artist to communicate concern about the
intense drought that is currently devastating parts of Australia and the region in which she lives, the
Central West of New South Wales.
IMAGE: Image: the artHITects (Gary Carsley & Renjie Teoh), Study for The Imaginary Sight of the Fancied Town of Bathurst, 2025 – 2150, torn two
layered xerographic print, 380 A4 80gsm photocopies applied to the wall and a pair of hinged cabinet doors, 330 x 510 cm. Courtesy the
artists.
