Bianca Hester - Lithic Bodies: Fragments

BIANCA HESTER - Lithic Bodies: Fragments assembles a constellation of works drawn from Hester’s recent large-scale project Lithic Bodies (2024), developed through long-term situated fieldwork along the Permian–Triassic extinction line on Wodi Wodi Dharawal Country. Visible in the strata of the Illawarra escarpment, this boundary marks the greatest mass extinction event in Earth’s history (c. 252 million years ago) and bears witness to climate change from the perspective of deep time.

Functioning as a material and conceptual loop – this event and the botanical life that survives it is registered through fragmented impressions of surfaces, including fossilised leaves, coalified wood, and traces of human industry and pollution – reappearing as screenprints, bronze sculptures, glass work and video. Re-situated as discrete fragments and abstracted from their site-specific relations, these works register the multiple afterlives of carbon and its material iterations across timescales. 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.

Alongside embodied fieldwork in the Illawarra region, the project also involved research in the Australian Museum’s palaeobotanical collections, as well as collaboration across social geography, geology, ecology and Indigenous knowledge.