A Blue Mountains City Art Gallery exhibition featuring seven Blue Mountains artists will tour five states from July next year.
As Far As The Eye Can See will go on a two-year tour of regional galleries thanks to a $75,000 federal government grant.
The popular printmaking exhibition from 22 Australian artists was on display at the gallery in the Cultural Centre last year, curated by Rilka Oakley.
It celebrates the contemporary topography of both landscape and printmaking. From Aboriginal desert storytellers and knowledge keepers, through the regional experience of World Heritage sites and journeys from city to country, the artists express their individual relationships to the land through a variety of print media.
Blue Mountains artists Locust Jones, Freedom Wilson, Julie Paterson, Gary Shinfield, Janet Parker-Smith, Chris Tobin and Judith Martinez all feature.
Jones’ work The Bird Agents 2016 is a large installation of steel plate etchings and their plates installed in a large grid reaching from floor to ceiling. Wilson’s Mountain Plateau Triptych 2016 depicts the flora in the Katoomba escarpment in screen print on linen.
Paterson’s monotypes stencilled on linen are of local areas including the Jamison Valley and Gardens of Stone, whereas Shinfield’s unique state woodcut prints reference the coal mining industry in the Hunter.
Parker-Smith looks at our connection to nature through photographic screen prints of people with animal heads.
Etchings were created by Tobin and Martinez after they participated in a residency at Cicada Press at UNSW Art and Design.
“The Blue Mountains Cultural Centre is delighted to receive this funding from the Australian government's Visions of Australia program. This grant will see us tour this in-house curated show to nine venues across Australia and showcase the artistic vibrancy of the Blue Mountains region to a national audience,” said exhibition manager Sabrina Roesner.
Macquarie MP, Susan Templeman, congratulated the cultural centre.
“It takes an enormous effort to put together this calibre of exhibition in the first place, and then to secure funding to tour is quite a coup,” she said.
