Groundwork
Bianca Hester
Perimeter Editions
English
Softcover
Edition 69 of 500
208 Pages
280 x 200 mm
2022
ISBN 9781922545053
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 the 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…
(source: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/products/groundwork-bianca-hester)
About the Artist
Bianca Hester is a multidisciplinary and highly collaborative artist whose spatial, sculptural and sometimes ephemeral interventions into public sites heighten awareness of social contexts and architectural spaces. She works in response to specific material, social and spatial conditions and builds provisional constructions and open-ended situations, often involving collaborations, events, imagery and video. Her practice explores the manifold rhythms at play within and across various sites, generating and interposing other temporalities (movements, materialities, actions) in order to open up possibilities for how we might engage, encounter and occupy place.
biancahester.net
(source: https://www.sarahscoutpresents.com/artists/37-bianca-hester/overview/)
About the Publisher
Perimeter Editions is the award-winning publishing imprint of Melbourne-based bookstore Perimeter Books and distribution house Perimeter Distribution. Releasing its first publication in 2012, Perimeter Editions’ focus rests on publishing autonomous books in close collaboration with photographers, artists, curators and writers. Its publications exhibit a criticality and sensitivity to content and form.
perimetereditions.com
(source: https://perimetereditions.com/filter/Izabela-Pluta/About)
