Blue Mountains City Art Gallery

Above the Clouds: 10 Years of the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Collection

28 May – 10 Jul

This extensive collection survey features works acquired since the opening of the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre including several artworks commissioned for the Cultural Centre’s public areas. Since 2012 over 130 artworks have been acquired for the Collection in the form of donations, cultural gifts, and purchases through the Collection Acquisition Fund.

The works in the Collection celebrate the cultural identity of the Blue Mountains and beyond. Mediums range from painting to photography, video, print, and installation. Artists represented in the Collection explore unique local natural and built landmarks, environmental themes, the diverse and creative community of the Blue Mountains as well as broader national and international contemporary themes.

A Blue Mountains City Art Gallery exhibition

ANDREW MERRY Burnt out walking track to the Grose Valley 2013, archival pigment print 1/10, 56 x 84 cm. Donated to the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Collection by the artist 2015.

A private InSight Members tour of artist’s studios inspired by the 10 Years Collection Survey exhibition

Sunday 26 Jun 10:15 am – 2:30 pm

A second tour added due to popular demand! Join us for a journey to three local artist studios in Katoomba and Blackheath. This special InSight Members event is dedicated to artists from our Collection. Beginning with a tour of the Collection survey exhibition at the Cultural Centre, we will then visit the studios of Locust Jones, John Caldwell and Julie Harris.

Time will be provided for a lunch break in Blackheath village. Participants must arrange their own transport to artist studios.

Members bring a friend! We are opening up bookings for InSight Members to bring up to two friends, ticket prices apply.

Bookings are essential via Reception on 4780 5410. $25 all tickets.

Image: Julie Harris in her studio.

We Are Here – Nyaliya YinYam & Connections

25 Jun – 7 Aug

For NAIDOC 2022 Blue Mountains City Art Gallery will feature exhibitions by two local art groups: The Walanmarra Artists & Friends Group and the Painting Up Country TAFE group. Both groups explore the 2022 NAIDOC theme Get Up Stand Up Show Up.

We Are Here – Nyaliya YinYam

Blue Mountains Aboriginal community participants in the Painting Up Country TAFE course have been creating outline cut-outs of themselves using MDF boards to be painted and filled with mixed media images, pertaining to their own personal cultural connections and childhood environments.

These figures assembled onto the wall at the Cultural Centre and connected in some way emphasise the strength of unity. Despite our differences and physical ailments, working together and standing united helps consolidate our public voice.

We Are Here – Nyalia YinYam represents that solidarity and strength. The Walanmarra Artists & Friends Group: Connections

The works in Connections tell the story about standing together. They reflect our true connection to culture and Country and together, like these artworks – even when we stand alone – we show our strength through our connection with others.

When we get up it is through our art, our storytelling and coming together which shows up the strength of our connections throughout all time.

Our group uses a mixture of different techniques on silk – wax, gutta, natural dyes and plant imprints.

Participating artists are: Aunty Bev Eaton, Kerrie Miller, Linna King, Jade Bell, Serena Holman, Lynne Elliott, Pip Smith, Jan Groves, Jess Gemell and Sue Wildman.

NAIDOC Community Day

Saturday 2 Jul 10 am – 6 pm Free admission to Gallery and Into the Blue for the day.

The 2022 NAIDOC Community Day will be a full day of celebrations. See below for a program of events.

Chris Tobin, NAIDOC 2018. Photo: Ben Pearse

Lomandra Weaving

10.30 am – 12.30 pm 30 min classes with Darren Charlwood. Tickets are free, but essential via Eventbrite.

Family Workshops: Cindy Laws Stories and Craft

10:30 – 11:30 am 11.30 – 12.30 pm Learn how to make your own animal mask or clay echidna using bush leaves and sticks. Family Workshop tickets are essential via Eventbrite*.

Gallery Talk

11 am Curator’s Floor Talk with exhibiting artists. Free event. Family Workshops: Darren Charlwood Mind-map

1.30 – 2.30 pm 2.30 – 3.30 pm Discuss environment, space & community, and create individual maps telling a story through symbolism. Family Workshop tickets are essential via Eventbrite*.

Wagana Dance Performance

4 pm

Yarning Circle

4.30 – 6 pm Our Yarning Circle will be on the topic of Caring for Country. Join us around the warming fire for a chat, some damper and a cuppa.

Family Workshops tickets: $15 per adult / $10 InSight Members. When purchasing an adult ticket you may add on up to five children to the booking.

Eddie Abd: killer tongue, i love you

16 Jul – 4 Sep

killer tongue, i love you is a major new body of work by multi-media artist Eddie Abd. The exhibition opens a conversation around the idea of mother tongues as carriers of identity within the context of the artist’s personal experience of growing up in a French cultural hegemony in Lebanon and raising a family in colonised Australia. Reconciling the need to create a different understanding of the self beyond dichotomies, language as a cultural marker becomes open to an exploration.

Through video, digital prints and object installation Abd works with her family to express these tensions through everyday instances of play and performance. Abd uses her own childhood collection of Martine picture books, narrated in French and acquired in Lebanon in the eighties, as a frame to explore language, family dynamics and representation. Viewed through a subversive lens, Martine’s much loved rosy adventures, become a ground for reflection on personal and wider cultural constructions.

A Blue Mountains City Art Gallery exhibition

Haunting Vic McEwan

16 Jul – 4 Sep

Haunting is a body of photographic and video work made in collaboration with dynamic environmental conditions, contested histories, and our negotiations of a complex future. Artist Vic McEwan created the large-scale works while artist-inresidence at the National Museum of Australia in collaboration with Senior Curator George Main.

Experimenting with the idea of painting with light into the landscape, McEwan projected images of historical objects and photographs onto a canvas of naturally occurring fog, water and smoke. By engaging with the active materiality of place, they sought to examine human history and the consequences of past actions.

Haunting is a travelling exhibition developed by the Cad Factory and the National Museum of Australia. Supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW, Sidney Myer Fund, Nelson Meers Foundation, W & A Johnson Family Foundation and assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program.

VIC MCEWAN Mary Gilmore 3: fog 2015, projection.

Yvette Hamilton: Space, Time, Light

13 Aug – 2 Oct

Space, Time, Light is an exhibition of new works by Blue Mountains artist Yvette Hamilton, based around her recent artist residency where she researched the Transit of Venus observation at Woodford Academy that occurred in 1874. This historical observation held great significance for astronomy and the photographic medium, but ultimately, was deemed a failure, and all photographic plates from this observation have been lost.

The works in the exhibition take a speculative response to these lost and failed images and draw together astronomy and photography with their shared anchor points of space, time and light – probing the gaps between vision, image and knowledge. Moving across time and space and using methodologies from the past and the present, this expanded photographic installation explores the seen and the unseen.

A Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Exposé Program exhibition

Botanical Cyanotypes and Lumen Printing with Yvette Hamilton

Saturday 20 Aug 10 am – 12.30 pm

Be inspired by historic photographic pioneer Anna Atkins in this camera-less photographic printing workshop. Wander through the rooftop garden at the Cultural Centre and collect botanical specimens, or bring your own, to make beautiful compositions inspired by nature. Using both cyanotype and photographic paper, you will take home a series of beautifully coloured images and learn two fundamental camera-less processes.

$70 / $60 InSight Members Bookings essential via Eventbrite.

Getting off “Auto” mode with Yvette Hamilton

Saturday 20 Aug 1:30 – 4 pm

Ever wanted to be able to get off “auto” mode and improve your photography? This workshop will teach you the fundamentals of manual photography, covering all the techniques and tricks you need to improve your landscape or portrait photographs. Bring your own DSLR that has manual functionality and really get to know your camera. Suitable for teens and up.

$50 / $40 InSight Members Bookings essential via Eventbrite.

Vicky Browne: Work/Play

10 Sep – 16 Oct

This exhibition explores our relationship to the actions of making and experiencing through the lens of being ‘at play’. Browne is interested in the dual complexities of work and play, and how our experience of the world is embedded in materiality which we express through our actions (work/play). Our connection to materials – and our own materiality – is central to the exhibition which experiments with material possibilities, creating encounters to be experienced, felt and contemplated.

Among other things, the exhibition asks a robot vacuum cleaner: “who is in charge of who and what part do we play in interrelated ecologies?” We understand things through language, the body, rituals and routines, and interconnected systems – these frame what we call things and how we know and understand things: the thingy-ness of things.

A Blue Mountains City Art Gallery exhibition

VICKY BROWNE Cosmic Noise 2015, ongoing, mixed media, dimensions variable, Installation view of Material Sound at Plimsoll Gallery. Photo: Remi Chauvin.

VICKY BROWNE After the Gold Rush 2021, polymer clay with gold lacquer. Photo: Harry Klien.

Vicky Browne Artist Talk

Saturday 10 Sep 11 am – 12 pm

Join exhibiting artist Vicky Browne in a talk about her creative process and exhibition Work/Play.

$5 / FREE for InSight Members Ticket includes Gallery entry Bookings essential via Eventbrite.

Adrienne Richard: The Way We Live Now

8 Oct – 27 Nov

The Way We Live Now uses drawing and ceramics to explore the concept of ‘Bio history’ – the study of human situations, past and present, against the backdrop of life on Earth.

Inspired by Stephen Boyden’s book The Bionarrative - the story of life and hope for the future, Richards has created an imaginary archaeological dig where the fragments and shards of humans’ material culture are juxtaposed with those of the rest of our living planet.

Hand built ceramic forms, surface decoration and glazing techniques come together to highlight environmental issues, humans place on Earth and to question ‘the way we live now’.

A Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Exposé Program exhibition

ADRIENNE RICHARDS Bionarrative Shards (horizontal) 2022, glazed stoneware and porcelain, dimensions variable. Image courtesy the artist.

The Archibald Prize 2022 Regional Tour

22 Oct – 4 Dec

The annual Archibald Prize is eagerly anticipated by artists and audiences alike. Judged by the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW, the prize is awarded to the best portrait painting. Since 1921 it has highlighted figures from all walks of life, from famous faces to local heroes, reflecting back to us the stories of our times.

The Archibald Prize is an Art Gallery of New South Wales touring exhibition Presenting partner ANZ

Archibald Prize 2022 finalist, Blak Douglas Moby Dickens, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 300 x 200 cm. Courtesy the artist, AGNSW, Mim Stirling. Sitter: Karla Dickens. Archibald In-Conversation

Saturday 22 Oct 11 am – 12.30 pm

Join us for an in-conversation with local Archibald finalists and their subjects to discuss the people behind the portraits. This will be an insight into the complex process of creating a likeness and the relationships that develop along the journey of portraiture.

$20 / $10 InSight Members $15 Special Offer for Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival ticket holders

Special InSight Members Offer InSight Members can purchase up to two tickets for their friends and family at the members rate of $10 for this event.

Promotional codes for discounts will be communicated to InSight Members and Writers’ Festival ticket holders closer to the event.