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.

Converging in Time MUMA Monash, Melbourne
(2017)

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.

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.