Branch Activities

Current projects on the boards for the CBD Branch of the Country Women’s Association are as follows:

Elizabeth Woods – Beauty Pageant

Gary Collins asked one Miss America finalist, “What’s your favourite part of the pageant?”  ”Lunch,” she replied.

The CBD Branch of the Country Women’s Association  aims to articulate the idea of ‘community’ as a heterogeneous group of people formed around common self-interests and working in real cooperative relationships. The proposition is to build a site, in this case create a Beauty Pageant that is suggestive of a liberated space, outside the historical model associated with the word Beauty and Pageant. The Traditional beauty pageant has been and continues to be a highly controversial and provocative event.
The word beauty is complex and often is manipulated and co modified. Beauty will be used to sculpt an event that will hypothesize to the general public the idea of beauty and how beauty can be utilised to re evaluate the everyday, a role that the CWA has promoted for the past 75 years. The CWA Beauty Pageant has the potential to effect and to re-engage the general public’s view of beauty.
November 12th 2011 Hobart Town Hall.

Bec Stevens project

As an artist I have often used my working process as an opportunity to engage with public space in lateral ways and certain works have acted as gestures for re-claiming communal ownership of public space. My intention for the CWA CBD is to create social platforms that intervene in the fabric of the city and create space for women and young children; in much the same way that the physical space of the CWA shopfront gives visibility to a specific group of women, and promotes inclusion of these women within the city.

The STOP. REST. PLAY., is one of the initial CBD Branch activities.  Primarily, the STOP. REST. PLAY., is about generating outcomes for greater inclusion of children in Hobart’s CBD. It will facilitate a short-term parents and children’s space in a temporarily un-used shopfront, while also also being be used as a generative, research space to hold a number of activities. These activities will give time to imagine how Hobart’s CBD could become a more child friendly space.

The project follows in the tradition of the provision of Rest Stop’s for the members of the Country Women’s Association. Rest Stops were provided as a place of comfort for women and their families, offering facilities such as tea rooms and wash rooms for women away from home.  They also acted as spaces for communal gatherings and exist as one of the many ways that the CWA as an organization functions in supporting the well being of women, and in turn, their community.

The STOP. REST. PLAY.  is informed by Bec’s personal experience of new motherhood and has been developed by a number of interviews with other parents. It is a response to the current lack of amenable child friendly facilities in Hobart’s CBD, which are also articulated in the recent Gehl report, the inner city development plan, commissioned by the Hobart City Council. The STOP. REST. PLAY.  will occur over a three-week period during November/December and will be located at 126 Murray St, Hobart. This site is strategically and fortuitously located diagonally opposite the State Library, which is one of the few spaces parents with young children regularly frequent in the city.

Judith Abell – CWA CBD Branch blog.

We  see the blog as another project of the CBD Branch. Read my opening post  here to understand a little about the way that I see my role in the Branch.