Lithic Bodies: Connecting through place

Join artist Bianca Hester in conversation with exhibition curator Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris and Jerrinja Yuin artist and educator Peter Hewitt. Together they will discuss the social and environmental entanglements of the Illawarra coastal region on Dharawal Country, and how this has shaped Hester’s new exhibition ‘Lithic Bodies’.

This conversation traces the development of ‘Lithic Bodies’, an expanded sculptural response to the vast geologies and deep time stories embedded in the Illawarra escarpment. Bianca, Bronwyn, and Peter will offer insights into the extensive situated fieldwork underpinning the project, including close engagement with specialists spanning fields of social geography, geology, paleobotany, horticulture, and Indigenous knowledge. Together they consider the diverse ways of knowing and relating to place. They will reflect on their own experiences of spending time together walking, listening, and sharing ideas to more deeply engage with this complex landscape.

Bianca Hester is an artist, writer, and educator based on Dharawal Country who is engaged in relational place-based practice with a focus on materiality. Her research explores entanglements between colonial inheritance, environmental crisis, human-nonhuman bodies, extinction, and regeneration registered within specific locations, and across timescales. Through a combination of fieldwork, archival research, embodied site-writing, studio production, collaboration, and performed actions, Hester produces multilayered projects that unpack the material and social conditions of specific sites.

Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris is a curator, writer, and researcher with expertise in the politics and poetics of eco-aesthetics, specialising in water and hydrofeminism. Based on Darug and Gundungurra Country, she is a Research Fellow at UNSW Art & Design. Bronwyn maintains an independent curatorial practice and her first monograph The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water was released with Routledge Environmental Humanities Series in 2024.

Peter Hewitt is a Jerrinja Yuin man with deep family, community, kinship, and cultural connections. Peter weaves his expertise in education and creative arts in his role as a Senior Lecturer in Aboriginal Education at the University of Wollongong to help care for Country. He is currently undertaking a PhD on Country-centred approaches to curriculum in Initial Teacher Education and is the co-lead of the Country, Contexts, and Cultures focus area at the Early Start Institute, illustrating his commitment to respectful, Country-centred research. Peter's contemporary painting practice spans over two decades, reflected through solo exhibitions and prestigious art prize recognitions. His paintings are housed in public collections at institutions including Wollongong City Gallery, Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, and have been in numerous art prizes including Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize and National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.

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Presented in conjunction with ‘Bianca Hester: Lithic Bodies’ at UNSW Galleries (27 September – 24 November 2024) and Clifton School of Arts (12–27 October 2024).