Branch Profile

CWA CBD branch mission

The CBD (Central Business District) Branch is an ongoing art exhibition that appropriates the organisational structure of Country Women’s Association to articulate both ideas, of ‘exhibition’ as a platform for self-representation and of ‘community’ as a heterogeneous group of people aggregated around common self-interests.

In appropriating specifically the structure of Country Women’s Association, an organisation that has existed worldwide for 75 years, the exhibition project considers an already existent platform for the self-interests of women and particularly reviews the women’s role in the promotion of change and the reshaping of established cultural values at a grass roots level.

The CBD Branch was instigated by curator Paula Silva and will operate throughout collaborations with artists who wish to engage with the branch’s mission. The branch’s first activities will be designed, produced and delivered by founding members and Tasmanian artists Rebecca Stevens, Elisabeth Woods, Sharon East and Tasmanian writer Judith Abell.

The CBD Branch is located in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. To read about the moment when our Branch was opened, click here.

Kate M Burton Photography

Branch Members

Paula Silva - Curator/Branch President

Paula Silva is an independent curator working with artists in the creation of representation platforms within the public sphere. Her interest in alternative exhibition development methodologies and art practice outside traditional gallery contexts led her to commence a doctoral research at the University of Tasmania in 2008.
Recent exhibitions curated by Paula are Clarendon Estate, a site-specific exhibition part of the Trust series, co-curated with Prof. Noel Frankham and produced by the University of Tasmania in collaboration with National Trust Tasmania and the festival Ten Days on The Island in 2009; and Expand/Contract, an event and exhibition produced for the off-site program of Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania also in 2009. She is currently Associate Curator in the public art series Iteration Again, working with Head Curator David Cross from Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand. The series will be presented in Tasmania in 2011.

Judith Abell - Branch Secretary/Founding member/ project blogger 

Judith is a sculptor, designer and freelance writer who shares her time between small design practice Futago and her own sculpture studio in an old boathouse on the edge of the Derwent River.  Her writing is predominantly review-based and covers art and design. Magazines include Artichoke, HOUSES, Architecture Australia, Australian Art Collector and Realtime. Her writing  style is intended to be observational, accessible and decidedly non-academic. Recent sculpture shows include the 2009 Moorilla Scholarship and Expand/Contract (curated by Paula Silva). She is also currently working on a raft of permanent public art projects through her role at Futago. For Jude’s first post, explaining a little more about her role in the project, please click here. To look at Jude’s work:  www.judithabell.com     www.futago.com.au

Elizabeth Woods – Branch Treasurer/Founding member

Elizabeth Woods lives and works in Hobart Tasmania, Queensland and France. For the past ten years her work has focused on temporary site-specific public art, both nationally and internationally. The most distinguishing characteristic of her work is the factoring in of the general public into the arts activity, Woods utilises everyday objects and events as a conduit to facilitate community dialogue. She has received numerous grants and has undertaken various residencies and commissions throughout Europe and Australia, her most recent being the UNESCO Aschberg residency with CAMAC in France in 2007. In June 2009 Elizabeth undertook a major commission with co collaborator Kevin Leong in the Champagne region of France with the Monuments Nationaux Chateau de La Motte Tilly. Elizabeth completed her PhD with the Tasmanian School of art, her thesis topic focused on temporary public art and events within communities.    www.in.situ.net.au

Bec Stevens – Founding Member

Bec Stevens is a Hobart based artist whose practice utilises photography, drawing, object-assemblage and plant matter as tools to respond to the social and historical nuances of constructed space. Recent group exhibitions include Green, Plimsoll Gallery (2010), Look Out, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (2010) and Vigorous Everfrost, CAST (2009); along with a collaboration with the Hobart based, landscape architectural and planing firm, ‘Inspiring Place’ for the international action, PARKing day in 2010. She has held regular solo exhibitions and has received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and Arts Tasmania for projects and residencies both locally and interstate.

Lucia Usmiani – Founding Member

Lucia’s bio will be posted here soon.

Guests of the branch

Narelle Jubelin

For almost three decades Narelle has stitched miniature petit points and combined them with readymade objects and textual citations in architectural, photographic and painterly installations. The exhibited works mark the journeys that objects and images make through the world as part of a global tracking of travel, trade and tourism within critical feminist frameworks. The frequently collaborative projects involve narratives on education, vernacular traditions, regional modernisms and the built environment, often fraught with exile and displacement. Her work articulates ideas of identity intersected by cultural and economic history, and within this, the role of the women through collective activities, offering us alternative narratives of Australian identity in general, and women’s participation within that representation, in particular.

From the mid 1980′s she taught at various universities in central and western Sydney, where she first met her former student, now, Hobart based artist Lucy Bleach. Since the mid 90′s Jubelin is visiting Professor for the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, Goldsmiths College at the University of London and Maumaus Post Graduate School, Lisbon. She was awarded a Paul Keating Fellowship (also known as The Australian Artists Creative Fellowship) in 1997, an Australia Council Fellowship in 2001 and a new work grant in 2011 for the itinerant exhibition Vision in Motion, travelling Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide 2012-13.

Lucy Bleach

Lucy Bleach works within an installation based practice, developing artworks that examine our engagement with tenuous, contingent and at times volatile environments, natural and built. Within her practice she draws on close interaction with specific communities to activate the material and conceptual textures of a work. Her chosen media is cross-disciplinary, often incorporating surprising materials to revision familiar objects and domestic spaces, on miniature and epic scales. Her works slip between public and private thresholds, inviting opportunities for encounter and exchange beyond the artist’s touch.

She has maintained an active and experimental art practice since completing undergraduate studies from COFA, University of NSW, 1990, where she was a student of Narelle Jubelin, then completed a Masters of Fine Art at the Tasmanian School of Art, UTAS 2007, and continues to develop a professional public exhibition practice that is gaining local, national and international momentum.

In this time she has produced solo commissioned work for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Volcano Lover, and the Devonport Regional Gallery, Local Colour. She participated in the 4^th Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial with the work Oral Fibre in Japan and produced the work Homing for the temporary public art project Iteration Again.

She has participated in four Ten Days on the Island festivals, and was recently an Asialink Visual Arts Resident in Japan. She has received New Work and Professional Practice grants from the Australia Council and Arts Tasmania. Her current research focus is on volcanic environments and their communities around the world, supported by the Qantas Contemporary Art Award.

Lucy is an Associate Lecturer in Sculpture at the Tasmanian School of Art

 

Sponsors/support.

Our banner based identity was created by graphic designer Ingrid Berger.

This project is supported by the Hobart City Council.