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Regional Australia is full of excellent, rigorous, exciting and tenacious professional performing artists, organisations and companies, doing great work that amplifies the voices of regional Australians. However, there still exists a suite of significant misconceptions and assumptions about the reality of being a performing artist practicing in the regions, perceptions that create great challenges for regional artists to face.

Structured around things people say about the regions, and also things regional artists want you to hear. ‘Things I've Heard about Regional Artists’ lays bare the metro-centric perspectives around arts and cultural work in Australia, raises the voice of independent regional artists, and offers some potential strategies in how we, as a sector, can contribute to greater visibility, viability and sustainability for regional artists and their cultural communities.

The session explores the space between Regional and Metropolitan. By interrogating the language regional artists use to talk about their practice, their challenges and their opportunities, alongside the language used by our metro counterparts, this conversation seeks to reveal the unspoken perceptions that keep the regional/metro divide entrenched.

Image: Kate Smith in a development by Lingua Franca, Bathurst, NSW. Photo by Margaret Hogan.