MAMA purchases Table Top photo

Bathurst photographer and artist Nicole Welch has unveiled her exhibition Eastern Interiors at MAMA and it features a stunning photograph of Table Top Mountain.

Welch's remarkable collection of photographs of regional landscapes are on show at the Maurice Chick and Sandra McLeod Miller Gallery upstairs at MAMA.

She followed the footsteps of explorers Hume and Hovell and drew on the journal of NSW Governor Lachlan Macquarie, taking words such as "silence" and "frightful" and projecting them onto the landscape.

"Those words have a historic and a contemporary meaning," she says.

None of the photographs are created digitally.

At Albury's Table Top Mountain Welch placed a large antique mirror on the mountain to reflect on the area's beauty and history.

She stayed at Table Top Mountain for four days to capture the lighting she was looking for. The result was the photograph Magnificent Prospect #2.

"In 1824 explorer William Hovell wrote in his journal about Table Top Mountain when he and Hamilton Hume camped at its base when they passed through the region," she said.

"From the outlook to where they climbed on Table Top they scanned the surrounding landscape to see that it was indeed a magnificent prospect."

Welch said Table Top was an important place to the Wiradjuri people who knew it as "Mullyan – yar – gunyah" which loosely translates to "the home or breeding place of eagles".

The exhibition is presented in partnership with Brenda May Gallery.