THE BIRTHING WOMAN PROJECT

THE BIRTHING WOMAN PROJECT

Hannah Dupree-Team Melbourne, T1, Q4.

In 2008 in the Landmark Education ‘The Power to Create’ course, Hannah created a game for her life: By 2018 art and sport will be of equal value to society. Considering her love for the impact of public art on society and the freedom of self-expression that is created in a festival environment, she saw a way to design and realize the game she dreamed about. Suddenly, the large-scale art project she and her friends had been thinking about creating for the Burning Man festival appeared in a new light.

When fully constructed, the sculpture they are designing will be a cluster of large-scale, dressed aluminum domes and inflatable shapes that will be a massive representation of a reclining pregnant woman emerging from the desert. The domes and inflatable create pockets of internal space for artistic play and external lines for expanded conceptual vision.

Guiding the process is the ‘Oz Birthing Woman Association Inc’, formed in Hannah’s second quarter of Landmark Education’s Team Management and Leadership Program. The Oz Birthing Woman Association is structured as a not for profit incorporated association. The group is working in a non-hierarchical model of management based on “Pods”. It is a system based on equality, it facilitates free communication and decision making, each Pod being independent in its goals while always focusing on its role in the overall project.

One year out, as testament to her teams determined vision and commitment to the project, a 13.5m breast dome has been created. It had been fitted with cutting edge 360 degree cinematic projectors and creates a sense of the ground breaking technology that is being developed inside of her team.

The overarching intent of Birthing Woman Project as a multi-dimensional interactive art installation is to heal, balance and activate a new generation of consciousness that brings attention to aspects of conception, gestation and the delivery of ideas.  It also aims to encourage greater awareness of recognized feminine energies, such as being receptive, being intuitive and nurturing. The project’s view is that our current climate is relentlessly personified by ‘masculine’ energies, reflected by war and conflict, consistently reinforced through the global media.  The aim of The Birthing Woman Project is to balance ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in a positive way. The project will not only have creative, cultural and personal outcomes for all who engage, but will affect all participants, in a way that promote crucial shifts in perceptions within the collective psyche.

Inside of Hannah’s global game The Birthing Woman Project has developed far beyond an ‘art piece’ for a festival. The project will compete in the Central Australian Desert in 2012 following events across metropolitan and regional Australia in 2010. The Project will have a major staging at the Burning Man Festival (Nevada, USA) in 2011, with a possible European Tour later in 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlvEkL76Evc