Nick Baylart
Wet dusk drive on the Hume 2025
synthetic polymer, kōzo, watercolour, and pastel on paper
23.5 x 19 cm
Friday 11 September – Sunday 8 November 2026
Speedscapes captures the way the wide flat plains of north central Victoria are experienced at speed: fast glimpses of sprawling agricultural country seen most often by road or rail, across long vistas and between roadside trees. Referencing the verticality and gestural mark-making of 20th century Australian painters, these works are memories of light and lines seen throughout the Goulburn Valley and beyond, built up through layers of paper, paint, and spray.
Nick Baylart is a former paper conservator and works in a unique mixed media style developed from his training in Melbourne and in Asia. Fine layers of kōzo tissue are tinted, painted, manipulated, and torn, and painted surfaces are carefully prepared using traditional paper conservation techniques, to create atmospheric landscapes punctuated with trees, branches, and shadows.
About the artist:
Nick Baylart is an emerging artist now based in Shepparton, Victoria, who has been exhibiting in Victoria, Queensland, and New South Wales since 2022. He completed his training as a paper conservator at the University of Melbourne in 2018 and worked as a conservator in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra before relocating to country Victoria after COVID.
Nick has worked in various collection care and exhibitions roles in art museums and galleries around Australia, completing his Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Art History from the University of Queensland in 2009. He is especially interested in late modernist depictions of the Australian landscape, and lists Fred Williams, Arthur Streeton, Rosalie Gascoigne, Philip Wolfhagen and Elioth Gruner as major influences.
Nick spent time training at the Cheng Shiu University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 2018, and was awarded Highly Commended in both the 2023 and 2025 Milburn Art Prizes in Brisbane.
