Bianca Hester - Lithic Bodies: Fragments

Lithic Bodies: Fragments assembles a constellation of works drawn from Bianca Hester’s recent large-scale project Lithic Bodies (2024), developed through long-term fieldwork along the Permian–Triassic extinction line on Dharawal Country. In this presentation in Naarm/Melbourne, screenprints, bronze sculptures, glass work and video are resituated as discrete fragments, abstracted from their site-specific relations while retaining their deep-time material entanglements.

Tracing impressions of fossilised plant life, coalified wood, industrial residues and geologic surfaces, the works register the multiple afterlives of carbon and its material iterations across timescales. Reconfigured within the gallery, these material fragments bear witness to the entangled geologic, colonial and industrial histories that underwrite the present, and situate fossil life as an active participant in it, carrying traces of extraction, extinction and survival into contemporary material conditions shaped by the pressures of climate crisis.