Perimeter Editions x Bianca Hester | Melbourne Book Launch
Perimeter is delighted to announce the publication of Sydney-based artist Bianca Hester's latest book Groundwork (Perimeter Editions 069). To celebrate the release of this compelling and multi-layered project, come along to a book launch and artist talk at the new Perimeter HQ (734 High St, Thornbury) on Saturday March 26, 2–3pm. Book your spot here!
This event is presented as part of NGV's Melbourne Art Book Fair 2022.
EVENT DETAILS
Perimeter HQ [new location]
734 High St, Thornbury VIC
Saturday March 26, 2022
2pm-3pm AEDT
Booking required ($5 + bf) – reserve your spot here.
SPEAKERS [Bios below]
Bianca Hester
Hélène Frichot
Therese Keogh
ABOUT THE BOOK
Groundwork, a major new book by Sydney-based artist Bianca Hester, 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.
Writes Hester: In 2015, my feet made contact with ground materialised from millennia of lava flows, once liquefied, now solidified as the dominant geology of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Emerging from the body of an aircraft, I stepped onto the international airport’s thin asphalt tarmac, which was as generic as any I’d seen. The standard airport aesthetic obscured any signs of the absolute specificity of this place...
Bianca Hester is an artist and writer living and working between the unceded lands of the Wodi Wodi people of the Dharawal Nation, and the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. Her practice works at the juncture between sculpture, geology, geography and socially engaged processes to explore cultural, ecological and political entanglements. Mindful of her situated embodiment and the complex implications of working on unceded sovereign lands, Hester’s projects explore multiple ways to investigate the material conditions of contested locations – particularly within urban domains and extractive zones across South Eastern Australia. Through a combination of fieldwork, archival research, collaboration, site-writing, studio production and performed actions, she produces multilayered projects that unpack the diverse sedimentations of specific locations, which have shaped their present condition. This generates an expansive form of public art unfolding as a series of objects, actions and texts in dialogue with a range of interlocutors, collaborators and participants. She has exhibited widely within Australia and internationally. Recent works include: Constellating bodies in temporary correspondence (2015–2016; 2021) exhibited within MCA Collection: Perspectives on place, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2021–2023; Sandstone, Lost Rocks, A Published Event, 2020; and Converging in time with Open Spatial Workshop, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2017. She is a long-term member of the Open Spatial Workshop and a Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of Research and Engagement in the School of Art and Design at UNSW, Sydney.
biancahester.net
Hélène Frichot is a Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, Australia. Until 2019 she was Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory, and Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Sweden. Her recent publications include Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (Bloomsbury 2018) and Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (AADR 2019). She has edited many anthologies including: with Naomi Stead, Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury 2020); with Gunnar Sandin and Bettina Schwalm, After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research (Actar 2019); and with Marco Jobst, Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge 2021). In 2018 Isabelle Doucet and Frichot co-edited a special issue of ATR (Architectural Theory Review) Reclaim, Resist, Speculate: Situated perspectives on architecture and the city.
Therese Keogh is an artist and writer, living and working on the unceded lands of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation (Melbourne, Australia). Her practice operates at intersections between sculpture, geography, and landscape architecture, to produce multilayered projects that explore the socio-political and material conditions of knowledge production. Therese works collaboratively through writing and research projects, including facilitating ‘Magnetic Topographies’ with Clare Britton and Kenzee Patterson – exploring interdisciplinary fieldwork practice – and ‘Written Together’ – a collective workshop for non-normative writing in arts research. Therese has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in Australia and Europe, and has published her writing widely. Therese holds a BFA from Monash University, an MFA from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and an MA Geography from Queen Mary University of London. She is currently undertaking a PhD at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
theresekeogh.com