I acknowledge and pay respect to custodians – past present and emerging – on sovereign Dharawal Wodi Wodi land where I live and conduct this creative practice. I extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. As a beneficiary of a colonial continuum and the resulting disproportionate distribution of wealth across this continent – I Pay the Rent – and invite you to do so too.
Bianca Hester’s practice explores entanglements of materiality, place and the forces of ecological change across timescales, producing expansive artworks that cultivate new modes of attentive and relational embodiment amid the pressures of climate crisis.
Recent work investigates interconnections between colonial inheritance, extraction, environmental crisis, evolution and extinction across the Australian continent. Employing relational, embodied and situational methodologies – she combines experimental fieldwork, engaging the geologic record (in archives and in situ), site-writing, sculptural production, collaboration and performed actions – to develop projects that unpack the material conditions of specific places. This results in an expansive form of public art unfolding in dialogue with a range of interlocutors and participants.
Converging in time was the first major museum exhibition by Open Spatial Workshop (Bianca Hester, Terri Bird, Scott Mitchell) in which we drew upon an extended period of research and engagement with the Natural Sciences Collection at Museums Victoria. Converging in Time included loaned specimens such as a meteorite fragment containing pre-solar grains, Saléeite crystals from the Ranger Uranium Mine in the Northern Territory, a 23-million-year-old kauri log from the Gippsland coalfields and a fossilised ‘sea lily’ unearthed in a Brunswick clay pit in 1923.
These specimens were incorporated into purpose-built structures, and presented in dialogue with OSW’s sculptural and video experiments. Together they develop a more complex and comprehensive understanding of the circulation of matter in the world, drawing out various histories and illuminating entanglements between geology, geography, colonisation and resource extraction, upon which our global society exists.
