The City of the Blue Mountains is located within the Ngurra (Country) of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples.
Blue Mountains Cultural Centre pays respect to Elders past and present while recognising the strength, capacity and resilience of past and present Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Blue Mountains region.
ARTS AND CULTURE
MANAGER
I’m delighted to step back into the heart of our region’s thriving arts and culture scene. The Blue Mountains Cultural Centre continues to be a place where creativity, community and connection flourish.
We’re proud to present Hayley Zena Poynton’s in-house curated exhibition PLAY!, an exhibition inviting audiences of all ages to immerse themselves in joyful, interactive, and artistled experiences. With a vibrant program of engagement activities, from circus workshops to the dopamine inducing performance and dining event SPECTRA SPECTRA, we invite you to a celebration of curiosity and imagination.
It is my pleasure to announce that the powerful exhibition co-curated by Leanne Tobin Ngurra Bayala (Country Speaks) has been extended until the end of 2026. This extension allows more visitors to engage with First Nations storytelling through digital media in our World Heritage Exhibition Space.
We’re also thrilled that the regional tour of our industry leading and award-winning exhibition sensorial, curated by Rilka Oakley, begins in November. Touring to four regional arts centres, sensorial will begin in Singleton on Saturday 15 November, delighting summer audiences before travelling to Tamworth in February. This tour, supported by Create NSW is a fantastic opportunity to share this groundbreaking exhibition with regional communities across the state.
While you’re visiting, take a moment to enjoy the breathtaking views from the Cultural Centre’s viewing platform and sample the seasonal menu at our café. Don’t forget to keep an eye out for the Members’ Christmas Sale in the Gallery Shop – an amazing opportunity to shop local and support our talented artists.
From all of us here at the Cultural Centre, we wish you a wonderful holiday season and thank you for your continued support of arts and culture in the Blue Mountains.
CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF SUSTAINABLE BLUE MOUNTAINS
Celebrate the sustainable achievements we have made in the last 25 years.
A display of children’s stories and artworks from the year 2000, plus the original Leaves of Hope, commissioned artworks and more. Read our hopes for 2025 and how we imagine our community and daily life might be improved.
A free activity at our Makers Trolley’s from 27 Sep – 23 Nov.
ALTITUDE ARTIST 2026 CALL OUT
Calling all artists, curators and art collectives to submit exhibition proposals to be included in the 2026 gallery program. Altitude is the Blue Mountains City Art Gallery’s annual callout for creatives in the Blue Mountains and Western Sydney looking to exhibit in this world class facility uniquely located in a World Heritage area.
Key dates:
Submissions open Monday 17 Nov 2025
Info session Friday 21 Nov 5.30 pm
Submissions close Sunday 22 Feb 2026
More info visit the exhibiting opportunites page on our website
WASTE RESIDENCY EOI NOW OPEN
Blue Mountains creatives are invited to submit an expression of interest for the 2026 Artist in Residence program at the Katoomba Resource Recovery and Waste Management Facility.
In her 2025 residency, freelance photographer Maja Baska used the opportunity to develop a waste-to-art photography project that features discarded electronics, including obsolete landlines.
More info & EOI forms www.bmcc.nsw.gov.au/arts-culture
A NEW LIFE FOR WENTWORTH FALLS SCHOOL OF ARTS
The Wentworth Falls School of Arts Revitalisation Project is complete thanks to funding from Western Sydney Infrastructure Grant and the NSW State Government.
A full technical upgrade of the lighting, audio and vision systems plus new retractable seating bank makes it ideal for performances, presentations and showcases.
For bookings see www.bmcc.nsw.gov.au/ community/halls-for-hire
INTO THE BLUE
The Blue Mountains World Heritage Interpretive Centre, a high-tech, interactive exhibition which explores the natural as well as the social landscapes of this unique area.
Audiences are invited to navigate their way through these stories in an immersive exhibition experience, introducing them to the richness and wonders of the Blue Mountains World Heritage area.
SESSION TIMES:
The World Heritage Exhibition is a 60-minute moving image program.
Ngurra Bayala (Country speaks) starts on the hour and runs for 45 minutes.
Into the Blue directly follows and runs for 15 minutes (starting at quarter to the hour, every hour).
NGURRA BAYALA (COUNTRY SPEAKS)
Co-curated with Dharug artist Leanne Tobin, Ngurra Bayala (Country speaks) celebrates the video work of seven female First Nations artists. This exhibition will be on permanent display until December 2026.
National Gallery of Australia Artists: Megan Cope, Fiona Foley, Julie Gough and r e a.
Blue Mountains Aboriginal practitioners: Aunty Sharyn Halls (with Craig Bender and Vera Hong); Jo Clancy (with Sue Healey) and Leanne Tobin.
THE SCALES: WHAT
11 Oct – 23 Nov
The Scales brings into focus a quarter of a century of contemporary artist what’s practice. This exhibition reflects the artist’s natural state of play, the unity of opposites. Traversing the complexities of both colossal and diminutive paintings, rapid and laborious art making, what employs an expansive range of techniques which bring attention to his transcendent expertise. The Scales contemplates the various modes of measurement which society employs to quantify magnitude and worth. Measuring the ever-expanding universe, the durational repetition of an arts career, and the measurement of human worth through the lens of time/labor.
This exhibition focuses on works made while living in the mountains, including his 2019 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize-winning painting of Robert Forster. A feast for the eyes, a banquet for the mind, The Scales promises to shock and awe.
COLOUR AND FORM
27 Sep – 16 Nov
Colour acts as the vehicle of emotion, while form offers the individuality of the artist’s hand.
This collection exhibition reignites the age-old discussion of how colour and form lay the foundation of an artwork, further developing our relationship to, and understanding of, colour and form. The selected works include our latest acquisitions by renowned local artists Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro as well as other gems from the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Collection.
A Blue Mountains City Art Gallery exhibition curated by Hayley Zena Poynton
CAPSULES OF MEMORY: GIANNA CHRISTELLA HAYES
22 Nov 2025 – 1 Feb 2026
Capsules of Memory explores how seeds, water, and foodways – the shared knowledge, beliefs, and practices around growing, preparing, and eating food – carry ancestral memory. The artist encourages visitors to participate in an interactive seed swap – where you can offer a seed, collected or found, place it inside an envelope provided, and exchange it with another visitor’s seed, extending the work into an act of communal memory and exchange.
A Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Altitude exhibition
CAPSULES OF MEMORY
OPENING NIGHT
Friday 28 Nov, 6 – 8 pm
A double opening event with PLAY!
All welcome, RSVP to: culturalcentre@bmcc.nsw.gov.au
ARTIST TALK
Saturday 22 Nov, 11 am – 12 pm
Join us in the gallery for a combined talk and creative fabric braiding plus seed planting ritual with artist Gianna Christella Hayes.
$5.50 / $3.20 Concession / FREE InSight Members. Tickets via Eventbrite
CITY ART GALLERY
PLAY!
29 Nov 2025 – 15 Feb 2026
PLAY! examines the facilitative role of art institutions in encouraging play, community connection and self-expression. This exhibition emboldens audiences to follow their curiosity and physically respond to the artworks, generating engagement atypical of institutional settings. In this space, audiences are encouraged to question and explore ideas of self and community through playful, dynamic processes.
By facilitating play-based interaction and creative exploration through the lens of fine art, gallery spaces have the power to uplift the welfare of the individual and their community. Real-world play acts as a significant tool that audiences can invoke to tackle feelings of isolation and social exclusion, particularly through generational and intercultural exchange with other participants. PLAY! encourages participants to reap the social benefits of exhibition spaces, reinforcing galleries as strongholds of community wellbeing.
Artists: Corrigan Fairbairn, Robert Frost, Melissa Gilbert, Nastia Gladushchenko, Sanné Mestrom, Nadia Odlum, Kate Reid, Andrew Yip.
A Blue Mountains City Art Gallery exhibition curated by Hayley Zena Poynton
GALLERY
TALK
Saturday 6 Dec, 11 – 11:45 am
A gallery talk between PLAY! artists and curator Hayley Zena Poynton. Following the talk there will be a PLAYshop: Sketch and Play, book your free ticket seperately via Eventbrite to not miss out!
$5.50 / $3.20 Concession / FREE InSight Members. Tickets via Eventbrite
PLAY! OPENING NIGHT
Friday 28 Nov, 6 – 8 pm
A double opening event with Capsules of Memory
All welcome, RSVP to: culturalcentre@bmcc.nsw.gov.au
PLAYSHOPS:
Sketch & Play
Saturday 6 Dec, 11.45 am – 1 pm
A unique creative adventure where sketching becomes playing.
Circus & More
Wednesday 14 Jan & Wednesday 21 Jan 10.30 am – 12 pm
PLAY!, laugh & learn circus skills with Candy Stripe Circus! Try juggling, hoops & more, then make your own prop to take home.
Smash or Add
Wednesday 14 Jan & Wednesday 21 Jan 1 – 2.30 pm
A playful clay workshop for all ages, focusing on the shared creative experience rather than a finished artwork.
Picnic, Panorama & Circus in the Sky Saturday 17 Jan, 3 – 6 pm
Picnic with us, visit PLAY! in the gallery & enjoy all the fun of the circus, learn juggling, hoops, diablo & more in a joyful family event.
All PLAY! programs are FREE admission, funded by the City of the Arts Trust Grants Program. Bookings essential through Eventbrite.
THE UNCODE: TIA MADDEN
7 Feb – 29 Mar
The Uncode calls on the science-fictional, magical, and archaeological to probe the ambiguous space where drawing and writing overlap. Through expanded drawing and installation, this exhibition asks if a contemporary activation of ‘uncoded forms’ – signs not-yet or no-longer tied to a language system – can conjure new meanings or unearth powerful, ancient, repressed ones.
Combining abstractions and ancient languages into notational sequences, The Uncode constructs a large-scale text-like installation that teeters on the edge of legibility, speculating if mark-making in a contemporary art context can cross spatial and temporal distances to make contact with ancient humans, distant futures, and metaphysical realms.
A Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Altitude exhibition
THE UNCODE OPENING NIGHT
Friday 20 Feb, 6 – 8 pm
A double opening event with Blue Mountains Portraits 2026
All welcome, RSVP to: culturalcentre@bmcc.nsw.gov.au
ARTIST TALK
Saturday 8 Feb, 11 am – 12 pm
Join curator Hayley Zena Poynton in conversation with Tia Madden as they discuss science fiction, mark making as language and the metapysical.
$5.50 / $3.20 Concession / FREE InSight Members. Tickets via Eventbrite
BLUE MOUNTAINS PORTRAITS 2026
21 Feb – 19 Apr
Blue Mountains Portraits is the Cultural Centre’s annual celebration of the local community and its diverse members. The exhibiting artists portray the unique people that make up the cultural fabric of the Blue Mountains and tell the stories behind the person. Over forty artworks in a broad range of styles and media such as painting, photography, drawing, collage and mixed media will be exhibited together with a selection of local students’ work.
A Blue Mountains City Art Gallery exhibition
BLUE MOUNTAINS PORTRAITS
2026 OPENING NIGHT
Friday 20 Feb, 6 – 8 pm
A double opening event with The Uncode
All welcome, RSVP to: culturalcentre@bmcc.nsw.gov.au
GALLERY TOUR
Saturday 28 Feb, 11 am
Join us in the gallery for a special insight into this year’s selection of Blue Mountains Portraits
$5.50 / $3.20 Concession / FREE InSight Members. Tickets via Eventbrite
CAPSULES OF MEMORY:
GIANNA CHRISTELLA HAYES
Altitude artist Gianna Christella Hayes speaks with curator Hayley Zena Poynton about her upcoming exhibition Capsules of Memory.
Hayley Zena Poynton: What brought you to the study of ethnobotany?
Gianna Christella Hayes: For me ethnobotany is about listening. Listening to how plants have witnessed both exploitation and resilience. Their journeys mirror ours, showing how people and plants move together, how they’re shaped by history, and how understanding those connections can guide healing and belonging. Through ethnobotany and ethnoecology, I explore how both plants and people in my own ancestral lineage have been subjected to commodification, carrying traumas within the land and body. But within these histories there’s also renewal, even a small seed secretly braided into hair and carried across oceans, holds memory, resistance, and belonging. Plants teach us how to restore, remember, and return.
HZP: In what ways do you feel your family histories have informed your art practice?
GCH: My family and I are in the process of tracing our roots, each of us in our own way, some through music, some through archiving, writing, etc. My path has been through plants. As I’ve been searching for ancestral answers, plants became my guides. Indigo, black-eyed peas, hibiscus roselle, cotton, okra, walnuts, oaks, high john the conqueror root, hickory, each plant is a living archive of migration, survival, and memory. They are our Plantscestors, ancient vessels of knowledge, food, medicine, rituals and shelter who have been here before us, with us, and will remain after us.
HZP: How do you approach the process of hand-dying textiles?
GCH: I get messy and fully immersed in the process. I love the tactile language that plant dyeing brings. It opens up a deeper way of understanding the plant. When I grow or gather the plant pigment, I’m already in dialogue with them, observing how they live and how they respond to light and water. Extracting their pigment and imprinting it to fibre feels like a form of archiving, like preserving a story or a language. For me every piece of dyed cloth becomes a kind of talisman, a symbol of protection and possibility.
We asked our exhibiting artists “What does PLAY mean to you?”
CORRIGAN FAIRBAIRN
I think of play as an experience of joy and wonder. My practice leads me down paths that nurture those feelings – it often feels like playing a game or music, where I shift elements around until a solution reveals itself. This open-ended approach is important for the work to manifest in playful and unexpected ways. In my recent work, a crank-handle is turned and cogs click into play. Wooden shapes, arranged like puzzle pieces, transcend their simple static forms and come to life – activated through motion and movement. The human element transforms it into a joyful animation, echoing the tactile pleasures of childhood play.
ROBERT FROST
For me, play is about joyful pointlessness. In the act of doing for no reason other than discovery, enjoyment, I’m able to untangle myself from constrictive patterns and perfectionism to discover new spaces I didn’t know existed. It’s about tapping into the brain fizzling excitement of the unexpected, which tells me I’m creating new neural connections. Play helps me find places I could never get to on purpose.
MELISSA GILBERT
Play, for me, is both method and medicine. It is how I shift habitual patterns and open what I call “space for possibility.” Through UnitePlayPerform, play is activated as a somatic, relational, and regenerative practice, movement that restores balance, sparks courage, and engages imagination as infrastructure. Our six-phase method: Disarm, Disrupt, Unite, Play, Perform, Transform, frames play as more than activity: it is pedagogy, ritual, and rehearsal for futures not yet born. In my art-making, play disrupts linear thinking, allowing new languages and forms to emerge. It is connective tissue linking body, ecology, and participation toward cultural transformation.
NASTIA GLADUSCHENKO
Play is a quiet superpower – unlocking imagination, sparking open minds, and making the impossible feel within reach. When art invites play, it doesn’t just entertain – it connects. It turns audiences into participants, creating inclusive spaces for curiosity, laughter, and dialogue. Play transforms creativity into community.
SANNÉ MESTROM
Play transforms art from something you simply observe into something you actively experience. Instead of just looking at artwork from a distance, play invites you to touch, move, explore, and create alongside it. This hands-on approach breaks down the traditional barrier between artist and audience – suddenly, everyone becomes part of the creative process. When people can interact with art playfully, they discover new ways of seeing and understanding that go far beyond what passive viewing offers.
NADIA ODLUM
Play is crucial to how I approach my artistic practice. I use playful processes to test edges of ideas, to see what materials can do, or to find new ways of connecting with others. However, the more I have studied play itself, the more I have realised how restricted opportunities for play are in everyday life. Urban environments contain few environments where people can truly play freely, and the competition for our time and attention seems to grow ever more fierce. I have started asking: how can we create more time, space and permission for play?
KATE REID
Play! , non-competitive engagement. Investigations without defined outcomes. Play is essential. Being a circus artist, musician and visual artist, since age 4 my life’s passion is in exploring and sharing play. Play has defined me internally and externally. The act of playing evolves our bodies and minds. Self-awareness, social skills and linear thinking. My performances and installations connect. Play, when done well, releases cortisol and serotonin, play literally makes us feel joy, whilst simultaneously enabling us to learn about ourselves and our environment, physically and socially.
ANDREW YIP
To me, ‘to play’ means to experiment and to challenge, to push one’s experience just that little bit beyond the norm. Asking someone to play is an invitation for them to adopt a different perspective or role and discover something in the process. Much of my work involves audiences within ‘living’ virtual environments, where their embodied presence causes a chain of action and reaction within other worlds. I’m interested in how our actions ripple out beyond ourselves and affect the systems we live in.
Scan here to visit the website and book:
FESTIVE WATERCOLOURS
Weekly on Wednesdays
12 Nov – 17 Dec, 10 am – 12 pm
Explore your creativity this season in our festive-themed Introduction to Watercolour Course with Jennie Deane.
$264 / $240 InSight Members
INDIGO IMMERSION
DYE YOUR OWN TEXTILE
Saturday 31 Jan, 10.30 am – 12.30 pm
A workshop honouring ancient knowledge, passed down via generations, and the ways in which textiles carry memory, identity, and meaning.
$65 / $55 InSight Members
Early Bird: $60 / $50 InSight Members for bookings before Sat 10 Jan
INSPIRED BY ART TERM 1 2026
Weekly on Tuesdays
17 Feb – 31 Mar, 10.30 am – 12.30 pm
Open to all, welcoming artmakers of all abilities, this accessible art program offers a supportive and inclusive space to explore your creativity.
$140 / $126 InSight Members / Accompanying carers materials fee $35. Tickets via reception.
CHALK PASTEL LANDSCAPES
2 days: Saturday 14 & Sunday 15 Feb 10.30 am – 3 pm
Join experienced artist and teacher Pam Vaughan to experiment with the subject of landscape. Explore the expressive potential of chalk pastels while combining them with pencil and light paint or ink washes.
$184 / $168 InSight Members
Early Bird Price: $176 / $160 InSight Members for bookings before Sat 24 Jan
EXPLORING DRAWING WITH PAM
VAUGHAN TERM 1 2026
Weekly on Wednesdays 18 Feb – 11 Mar, 10 am – 1 pm
This drawing class welcomes new participants and previous students eager to deepen their drawing skills. Pam offers a mindful and playful approach to studio practice, providing students with an opportunity to grow their creative confidence and autonomy.
$396 / $360 InSight Members
UNWIND, RECHARGE AND TREAT YOURSELF
The Gallery Café, situated within the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, is the perfect place to catch up with friends or take a break whilst visiting the Gallery. A relaxing and light-filled space, the Gallery Café, is a favourite with locals and visitors alike. The menu is seasonal and utilises local produce in its daily specials that include brunch items, salads, soups and quiches.
We are one of the Blue Mountains’ premier facilities for functions and events. Whether you’re looking for a space for 2 or 100, we’re sure to have the ideal space for your needs. Visit the venue hire page on our website for more information.
