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’s practice explores entanglements of materiality, place and the forces of ecological change across timescales, producing expansive artworks that cultivate new modes of attentive and relational embodiment amid the pressures of climate crisis.


Recent work investigates interconnections between colonial inheritance, extraction, environmental crisis, evolution and extinction 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 results in an expansive form of public art unfolding in dialogue with a range of interlocutors and participants.

Dust of these domains - Goulburn Goulburn Regional Gallery
(2025)

PERFORMANCE
2 August, 2025


EXHIBITION
Performance presented in the context
of the exhibition Horizons
6 June – 9 August, 2025

VENUE
Goulburn Regional Art Gallery and township


CURATED
Yvette Dal Pozzo


ASSOCIATED MATERIAL
Dust of these domains - script for Goulburn
Horizons invitation


PROJECT CONNECTIONS
Dust of these domains - Bundanon
Dust of these Domains - Paddington
Dust of these Domains – Wollongong during Circuits of Solar Descent

Dust of These Domains is an ongoing, site-responsive project that combines reading and walking, evolving in dialogue with the specific landscapes in which it is performed. Each iteration activates a script composed of fragmentary texts alongside hand-scaled bronze objects impressed with fossilised plant life from the Permian and Triassic periods—remnants of Gondwana’s deep-time ecologies, dating back approximately 250 million years.

Originally developed from Hester’s 2020 book Sandstone (Lost Rocks series) and first performed in 2023, the work operates as a constellation of “lively footnotes” that mobilises audiences and objects within curated, place-specific walks. These performances speak directly to material relations, geologic temporalities, and the environmental pressures shaping the sites they traverse.

The most recent iteration traced a circuit through Goulburn on Gundungurra land, inviting participants into gestures of listening, movement, and tactile engagement. Pausing at selected locations, text fragments written in response to the site were voiced into place, prompting reflection on the entangled social and environmental forces that define the current climate crisis.

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.