About this work
Trevor Nickolls held his first solo exhibition, From Dreamtime to Machinetime in Canberra in 1977. The exhibition title crystallised a central preoccupation of his work, the conflict between Dreamtime – his strong sense of Aboriginal identity, spirituality and affinity with land; and Machinetime – the ambivalent impact of the dominant, colonising culture, and its enticing machines, materialism and technological advancement. In this work, the eye set within the pyramid refers to Egyptian art, and is a symbol embedded with ancient universal alphabets, expressive of Nickolls’s aim to ‘bridge the gap between Western art and Aboriginal art’.