Past events are archived for future reference.
The exhibition survey: multiples, provides the viewer with a space to observe and navigate each object as part of a terrain, like points on a map. The objects each have individual meaning, yet collectively, they contribute to a deeper conversation about our human connection with the natural environment.
The work and collected objects in this cabinet draw on ideas and materials collected and developed over several years of Heather Hesterman’s practice. Collectively, the work investigates intersections of place, ecology, education and science.
Looking through this glass cabinet, we are brought closer into Hesterman’s world of seeing, which is often through an art/scientific lens. As viewers, we feel too, as if we are looking through the artist’s microscope or looking glass. The body of work before us shows a process of documenting, measuring, categorising and sifting through objects and issues both micro and macro. Hesterman uses repetition, time, space and scale as continual visual cues and themes in her artistic practice and research to explore issues concerning both our inner and outer landscapes: the emotional and the geographic. Works such as Warming, 2017, look at globally pertinent issues of climate change, whilst works like Waiting or ACT NOW, 2005, analyse the history and materiality of print media and the democratic model of disseminating information.
Hesterman’s training in fine art, education and landscape design combined with a passion for horticulture and an inherently active imagination, are the complementary perspectives in which she grounds her work. In her process of making, she says ideas evolve, extend and shift along trajectories, “like the unseen paths of a sub-terrain rhizome, sending shoots up from nodes to break through to the surface”.
Heather is a lecturer with the School of Art at RMIT and has exhibited locally and internationally with artworks held in both private and public collections in Australia, Germany and The Netherlands.
