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.
These gestures and actions are often enacted over time, with props, fragments and residues that emerge from the project's dense range of processes, assembled into exhibitions and installations. Projects have involved developing strategies for addressing the ways spaces are constructed and regulated and, more recently Hester, has been developing projects that engage directly with the fabric of the city, attempting to bring about an expanded form of public sculpture where multiple relations might converge.
Frequently collaborative and always experimental, Hester's recent projects have seen the artist work directly with the city fabric through action-and-response performances that engage with the dynamics, unpredictable forces and relations of her chosen terrain... While her tactics are decidedly contemporary, she also draws on art-historical moments from the 1960s on, playing with the language of minimalism, performance, happenings, video actions, installation, sound art, and relational and situational practices.
Bree Richards, Monash University Museum of Art, 2016.