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

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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, 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 generates an expansive form of public art unfolding in dialogue with a range of interlocutors and participants.

Lithic Bodies - Clifton Clifton School of the Arts
(2024)

EXHIBITION DATES
12 – 27 October, 2025

VENUE
Clifton School of the Arts, Clifton


CURATED BY
Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris


ASSOCIATED MATERIAL
Room sheet including list of works
Project brochure


PHOTOGRAPHY
Bianca Hester & Bernie Fischer

The Clifton iteration of Lithic Bodies unfolded in parallel with its presentation at UNSW Galleries, deliberately situating the work within the terrain that shaped its research. This location was not incidental: the Clifton School of Arts stands almost directly above the Bulli coal seam and the Permian–Triassic extinction line—a geological threshold marking Earth’s greatest mass extinction event. The building itself carries deep historical resonance, having been constructed by mine workers who laboured in that same seam and later led the 1907 strike.

Bringing the exhibition into this charged site was an offering to local audiences and an acknowledgement of the layered material relations—geologic, industrial, and social—that underpin the work. Here, fossil impressions, sculptural objects, and video works were installed against the backdrop of a landscape inscribed with extractive histories and ecological upheaval, inviting visitors to encounter deep time not as distant abstraction but as a force woven through bodies, places, and collective memory.

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.