Blue Mountains Creative Arts Network (BMCAN) is a community of arts minded volunteers whose aim is to support and encourage the development of members’ arts practices. Along with BMCAN exhibitions, members regularly hold their own exhibitions.

Blue Mountains Creative Arts Network also presents curated and selected exhibitions at United Cinemas, Katoomba in The Gallery, and at other suitable exhibition venues. The exhibitions showcase the work of a diverse range of selected local contemporary artists – painters, photographers and sculptors. All works exhibited are available for purchase.

The Fluidity project is a platform for the development of experimental collaborative artworks and partnership building between different artforms. Using a virtual collaborative space, The Fluidity Project will explore new themes and concepts every four months culminating in an online exhibition, performance, screening or gallery experience.

Mounted is an Artist Run Initiative (ARI) situated in the Lower Blue Mountains at Springwood. Based around a gallery space, Mounted stages exhibitions and creative arts events provide a platform for visual artists, writers and musicians to showcase their work. Mounted aims to build community through art.

To that end Anne Blair Hickman of BMCAN and Mark Denny of Mounted have entered in to an agreement to establish an artist collaboration project.

Blue Mountains Creative Arts Network Members as well as opening their studios for Arts Trails or Open Studios, regularly exhibit or some even run their own galleries. To find out when and where you can go to the gallery listings here and work out your own tour of some of the Blue Mountains most interesting art.

If an artist is also part of a current Arts Trail or also has an Open Studio this weekend then click on the appropriate icon/colour/link.

We are a group of people in the Blue Mountains using the arts to explore and celebrate the ‘wild’ and our interconnected relationship with nature and one another, to engage with a philosophy of regenerative living, an attitude of inter-being with all things. In this we acknowledge the 60,000 year cultural relationship between Australia’s indigenous peoples and Australia’s natural environment, recorded in songlines, music, dance, art, storytelling and kinship structures.

The Talking ArtZ Project seeks to tap into the resources of artists gathering together to shape and change culture, or just to ‘feed the creative spirit’ when the aloneness gets too much. It will be an incubator for wild ideas and creative collaborations, ideas that confront the significant issues of our time.

Artists often work in isolation, and the aloneness can lead to a kind of self or process-absorbed madness. No longer, or at the very least its a good excuse to get out of the studio for a cuppa!