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.

Groundwork (2022)

Hester, B. 2021. Groundwork.
Melbourne: Perimeter Editions.
ISBN 978-1-922545-05-3
208 pages

Groundwork (2021) finds its footing in the volcanic terrain of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (Aotearoa New Zealand). An expanded sculptural project that grew out of a series of research residencies in 2015, Groundwork is both social and geological in scope. Focused on a series of sites across the city where human activity, geology and ecology have converged in fraught and revealing ways, the book maps connections between the landscapes of Te Kōpuke Mount St John and Te Tokaroa Meola Reef; Ihumātao and Takapuna; Waterview and Matukutūruru Wiri Mountain. Through collaborative and consultative processes with local people, this work encompasses walking, sculptural production, exhibition, archival research and writing between 2015 and 2020. Engaging with landscape as a nexus of geologic materialities, nonhuman durations, land expropriation, extractive activities and ecological transformations, the book proposes ways to apprehend the complex sedimentations of a city.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

  • Editorial and critical review process: Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou, Clann Dhònnchaidh), Dr Monique Redmond, Dr Astrid Lorange, Dr Saskia Beudel, Therese Keogh, Pita Turei (Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki, Ngāti Pāoa, Ngaa Rauru Kiitahi)
  • Copyediting and proofreading: Marie Shannon
  • Design: Paul Mylecharane and Kim Mumm Hansen, Public Office
  • ISBN 978-1-922545-05-3
  • 208 pages, 28 x 30cm, section sewn cold glue bound, softcover with flaps, Perimeter Editions (Melbourne).
  • This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
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.