We would like to acknowledge the many years of service to BMCAN by Deborah Sheehan, who has resigned from the BMCAN Board of Directors and we welcome Willem Hendriksen from Retro Rehash, who is well known in the Blue Mountains community for his work with the live music sector across the mountains.

We are actively interested in recruiting someone from the visual arts sector, particularly from Lithgow,  Other interest groups who would be very welcome to join our Management Committee are the artisan community who worked with us on MAX21 and MAX22, and the performing arts sector.  secretary@bmcan.com.au.

BMCAN is committed to working with the arts and culture sector across the Greater Blue Mountains through the Arts & Culture Alliance Blue Mountains, for which we provide secretariat services (Barbara Lepani) and through our cultural ecology of networked partners.  In this we are well aligned with the findings of the recent ANA Report that priorities for the arts sector are: 

1. deploying cultural engagement to build cohesion across generations and different points of view
2. promoting arts and culture for wellbeing as a preventive and potentially remedial health measure
3. removing any barriers to accessing arts and culture

In line with these priorities, they suggest the best opportunities for the arts sector in 2023 areexploring ways  that engagement with the arts helps build intergenerational community resilience and hope in difficult times. How can the arts help address high levels of anxiety and depression in the population, and take a cross-portfolio approach? How can we take a transdisciplinary approach to the role of arts and culture in society, particularly as we face the intersecting challenges of climate change, species extinction and environmental degradation, wealth inequality and social fragmentation? 

Sharon Howard’s Gang Gang Gallery in Lithgow has taken up this challenge, creating a space that combines art exhibitions, workshops, music events and keynote talks that has made Gang Gang Gallery a key arts space as Lithgow transforms from its industrial and coal mining past to a new story built around regenerative energy and eco-cultural tourism.  Following in these footsteps, under the guidance of our new Director, Willem Hendriksen, we are working with Sam Williams of Lithgow to seek a grant to hold a live music event, combined with a poetry/dance slam in late 2023, to explore and celebrate Lithgow’s new journey.

We also ask, how can we use the arts to respond to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, in support of the Voice Referendum, and play our role in recognising that Australia’s unique cultural foundation and identity lies with its ancient 65,000 years First Nations cultural heritage, while Australia’s ambition is to be a socially cohesive multicultural nation that has overcome past colonial injustices—the focus of Noel Pearson’s Boyer Lectures.

BMCAN’s Regenesis Project speaks directly to all these challenges and in this we are working collaboratively with the Blue Mountains Planetary Health Initiative, the Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute and the Australia Earth Laws Alliance to explore how we in the arts sector can help all of us explore a more sustainable and regenerative way to live into the future.  

The old story was prosperity through economic growth and consumerism, a story that has led directly to the current crises driving up anxiety and depression.  We ask, what is the new story, particularly for non-Indigenous Australians who have ridden the past wave of prosperity and materialism, to find a new way to give meaning, purpose and hope to our lives? How do we learn from our First Nations culture about how to Care for Country in its multiple levels of meaning as a complex of stories, art, and connectedness to the Earth and all its life forms?

The recent arts exhibition and related events ‘Water Trail’ which runs from December 2022 to March 2023 as a joint project of the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre (Water: Presence and Absence), Blue Mountains Theatre & Community Hub (Water Overflow), Hawkesbury Regional Gallery (Water Dyarubbin) and Penrith Regional Gallery (Water Undercurrents) is an example of this approach. It combines art exhibitions, artist talks, workshops, dance performances and symposiums.  It links concerns about water management in the environment with flooding, fires and development, with First Nations cultural issues around Caring for Country.  Funded by participating councils and Create NSW.

For more information go to https://www.watertrail.au/

We look forward to your creative ideas so that we can get behind you and support your project ideas.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The BMCAN Team