Bianca Hester is an artist, writer and educator who specialises in critical place-based practice through artistic research. Her work focuses on the environmental aesthetics of a settler-colonial Anthropocene to investigate entanglements between colonial inheritance, extraction, environmental crisis, evolution and extinction evident within specific locations across Australia. 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 artistic projects that unpack the material conditions of specific locations across the continent, resulting in an expansive form of public art unfolding in dialogue with a range of interlocutors and participants.

Bianca has exhibited widely within Australia and internationally. Recent works include: Dust of these domains, SITEWORKS, Bundanon (2023); Reading Walking Lithic Bodies, Museum of Contemporary Art (2022), Constellating bodies in temporary correspondence (2015-2016; 2021) exhibited within ‘Perspectives on Place: Works from the MCA Collection relating to land, mapping and environmental change’, Museum of Contemporary Art (2021-2023); movements materialising momentarily, ST PAUL St Gallery, Auckland (2015); Down City Streets (with the Space Place and Country research group 2015); Fashioning Discontinuities presented during the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014); Hoops: sound tests, performances, documents, Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2013); only from the perspective of a viewer situated upon the surface of the earth does day and night occur, Glasgow International Festival for Visual Arts, (2012); a world fully accessible by no living being, which was the winning entry for the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture (2011); please leave these windows open overnight to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning, The Helen MacPherson Solo Commission at The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2010); and projectprojects at The Showroom in London (2008). She is currently developing new research titled Lithic Bodies, funded by Australia Council for the Arts individual project Grant) Project code: RG220506

Alongside exhibitions, Hester has developed numerous practice-led publications including: Sandstone, Lost Rocks, A Published Event (2020) and Converging in time, with Open Spatial Workshop, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2017) which was awarded the Museums Australia Publication Design Awards for major exhibition catalogue, 2018 and the AAANZ Best University Art Catalogue, 2018.Her recent book Groundwork (2021) is published through Perimeter Editions (#069).

Hester studied sculpture at RMIT, Melbourne, where she completed her practice-led PhD titled Material Adventures, Spatial Productions: Manoeuvring Sculpture Towards a Proliferating Event, in 2007 which won a University research prize in 2008. She was a founding member of CLUBSpropject inc in Melbourne (2002-2007) and is a continuing member of the Open Spatial Workshop collective with Scott Mitchell and Terri Bird since 2003. Hester has lectured at Victorian College of the Arts (2004-2012) and the Sydney College of the Arts (2016), where she was a post-doctoral research fellow and the co-leader of the Space, Place and Country research cluster with Dr Saskia Beudel between 2013-2016. She is a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow (2017-2018) and was an Artspace studio resident throughout 2017.

Hester is currently Associate Professor in Art and Design and is the Co-Director for Research and Engagement with Oliver Bown, an Associate Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), and on the Editorial Committee for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (AANZJA).

She convenes Studio Art Practice 5. She has experience teaching across all levels in undergraduate programs and in supervising practice-led Honours, MFA and PhD projects since 2004.

Website: www.biancahester.com

Open Spatial Workshop website: https://osw.com.au

Down City Streets: www.downcitystreets.com.au