INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day (IWD) will be celebrated around the Bega Valley with a number of events over the weekend.
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The Southern Women’s Group – Women’s Resource Centre (WRC) will be holding an exhibition titled Make It Happen, which is named after this year’s international theme, at the Spiral Gallery opening Friday at 5pm.
The exhibition will showcase the artistic talent of local women of all ages and will run at the gallery space until March 25.
Megan Luhrs from South East Arts will officially open the exhibition, and there will also be the announcement of the Bega Valley Shire Council young woman’s scholarship winner.
Saturday morning will see a talk by artist and coordinator of the Bega WRC Gabrielle Powell at the Bega Valley Regional Gallery.
Ms Powell will discuss the links between her practice as an artist and her role as a community welfare worker.
Every year IWD is celebrated on March 8, with its formation in the early 1900s, a time of great growth and instability in the industrialised world that saw booming population growth and the rise of radically different ideologies.
The day is now an official holiday in at least 27 countries globally, including Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cuba, Russia and China, where the tradition sees men honouring their mothers, grandmothers, wives, girlfriends and colleagues with flowers and small gifts, often having the equivalent status as Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day.
Kate Stead, whose collaborative artwork with her daughter Tazmin Bay titled House24/7 will be exhibited inside the gallery, said the day gave busy women like herself time to rejoice being female and feel part of a wider global community.
“It shows that we are all connected as a species and not just by nationality,” she said.
Her work was inspired by the mandala project that has been running through February at the WRC and is a comment on being constantly at home as a single parent of six children, with a seventh due this year.
“Everything is cyclic, and I wanted to express the repetitiveness of everyday life,” Ms Stead said.
“I’m extending my house and it’s so repetitive with the building and cleaning, things get quite cluttered with the kids at home.
“It’s nice to feel connected with other women globally, and it’s a time of recognising what it means to be female.”
The United Nations theme for IWD 2015 is “Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity: Picture It!” with governments and activists around the world commemorating the 20th anniversary year of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, an international roadmap towards realising women’s rights.