I acknowledge and pay respect to custodians – past present and emerging – on Dharawal land where I live and conduct this creative practice. I extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Sovereignty never ceded.

Bianca Hester

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Bianca Hester is an artist, writer and educator engaged in place-based practice through artistic research. Her work investigates entanglements between colonial inheritance, extraction, environmental crisis, evolution and extinction evident within locations across the Australian continent. Employing relational feminist methodologies, she combines experimental fieldwork, engaging the geologic record (in archives and in situ), embodied site-writing, sculptural production, collaboration and performed actions to develop projects that unpack the material conditions of specific places, resulting in an expansive form of public art unfolding in dialogue with a range of interlocutors and participants.

Bianca Hester is an artist, writer and educator engaged in place-based practice through artistic research. Her work investigates entanglements between colonial inheritance, extraction, environmental crisis, evolution and extinction evident within locations across the Australian continent. Employing relational feminist methodologies, she combines experimental fieldwork, engaging the geologic record (in archives and in situ), embodied site-writing, sculptural production, collaboration and performed actions to develop projects that unpack the material conditions of specific places, resulting in an expansive form of public art unfolding in dialogue with a range of interlocutors and participants.

Bianca has exhibited widely within Australia and internationally. Recent works include: Metabolic Scales (with Open Spatial Workshop), in ‘Earthen’ at Cement Fondu (2023), Dust of these domains, SITEWORKS, Bundanon (2023); Reading Walking Lithic Bodies, Museum of Contemporary Art (2022), Constellating bodies in temporary correspondence (2015–16; 2021) exhibited within ‘Perspectives on Place: Works from the MCA Collection relating to land, mapping and environmental change’, Museum of Contemporary Art (2021–23); Sandstone, Lost Rocks, A Published Event (2020) and Converging in time, with Open Spatial Workshop, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2017). Her recent book Groundwork (2021) is published through Perimeter Editions and her essay ‘Moving in memory of lava flows: between Te Kōpuke Mount St John and Te Tokaroa Meola Reef’, in Crone B; Nightingale S; Stanton P (eds.), was published in Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research, Onomatopee, The Netherlands.

She is a continuing member of the collaborative trio Open Spatial Workshop (2003–ongoing with Terri Bird and Scott Mitchell), a founding member of CLUBSproject inc (2002–07) and a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow (2016). Her project A world, fully accessible by no living being (2011) won the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture. She is currently an Associate Professor and Co-Director of Research and Engagement in the School of Art and Design at UNSW, Sydney; an Associate Investigator within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH); and sits on the Editorial Committee for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (AANZJA). For a complete CV of creative and published works, visit her UNSW academic profile.

Bianca’s work is held in private collections as well as publicly within the Museum of Contemporary Art Collection and The Monash University Art Collection.

Anthropogenic, Archive, Basalt, Brick, Bronze, Colonial continuums, Coal, Concrete, Cosmic, Deep time, Digging, Dirt, Dust, Embodiment, Extractivism, Extinctions, Floor, Fossil, Fragment, Geologies, Groundwork, Installation, Materiality, Object, People, Performance, Permian, Place, Plant life, Process, Meteorite, Moving, Moving image, Rubbings, Sandstone, Sculpture, Singular objects, Site, Sociality, Steel, Still image, Textual, Triassic, Walking, Wall.