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 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.
SandstoneLost Rocks, A Published Event (2020)
Hester, B. 2020. Sandstone.
Hobart: A Published Event.
ISBN: 978-0-6484927-6-4
96 pages
“Millions of years of evolution buried deep within the double helix of my body’s biologic fabric were on display during those few raucous hours. Rock enveloped in reptile embedded in mammal. Moan.”
Sandstone is a book of creative non-fiction based upon situated encounters with Sydney Basin’s dominant geologic material. The writing explores sandstone’s liveliness through textual fragments that consider entanglements between mammalian and geologic life. Attention is placed upon dust, mining, gestation, archives, weather, social histories, breathing, evolution and extinction – amongst other events. These fragments explore the myriad geo-social histories ingrained in sandstone in the time of the Anthropocene to propose a practice-led form of situated geo-ethics.
To purchase a copy of this book, visit Lost Rocks.
To download a 20 page extract of the book, visit this link.
