Blue Mountains News

Hosted by Museum & Galleries of NSW, the IMAGinE awards highlight the resilience, innovation and creativity of museums, galleries and Aboriginal cultural centres and recognise the people who work in them.

Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Artistic Program Leader, Rilka Oakley, and Public Program Coordinator, Sarah Emerson, attended the award ceremony at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at Sydney University in November.

Post-haste showcased a significant body of work from artistic duo Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro. The exhibition explored themes of ‘flight’ and ‘speed’, reflecting on the forced stasis of the world due to COVID-19 through site-specific interventions, installation, video and photography. Several new works were made in collaboration with students from local high schools and residents of Blackheath, including a 5-metre-high aeroplane wing titled Revolting Youth.

Ms. Oakley said: “The brilliance of Healy & Cordeiro is their ability to re-imagine everyday objects into playful critiques of serious issues. It was a significant opportunity for the artists and the Blue Mountains City Art Gallery to have this body of work on exhibition.”

The High School engagement project Epicormic Growth was highly successful with five local schools participating in workshops with the artists, to create a new modular Lego workBlock Party (2021) that was included in the exhibition. These same five high schools were invited to participate in theDead Smart Phone project where students painted a landscape onto a pre-primed dead smart phone – looking at the beautiful landscape they live in and transposing that onto a device they spend so much time looking at.

Due to the 2021 COVID lockdown, and to make this project accessible, kits comprising of primed phones and painting materials were delivered to students learning-at-home across the LGA. They then returned their completed phones for inclusion in the exhibition.

This is the third time the Cultural Centre has been recognised by Museums & Galleries of NSW at the IMAGinE Awards, having been highly commended for their NAIDOC week exhibitions and events in 2019 and for the Critical Mass community engagement programs in 2021.