Groundwork, a major new book by Sydney-based artist Bianca Hester, finds its footing in the volcanic terrain of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (Aotearoa New Zealand). An expanded sculptural project that grew out of a series of research residencies, Groundwork is both social and geological in scope. Focused on a series of sites across the city where human activity, geology and ecology have converged in fraught and revealing ways, the book maps connections between the landscapes of Te Kōpuke Mount St John and Te Tokaroa Meola Reef; Ihumātao and Takapuna; Waterview and Matukutūruru Wiri Mountain.

Through collaborative and consultative processes with local people, this work encompasses walking, sculptural production, exhibition, archival research and writing, and proposes ways to apprehend the complex sedimentations of a city.

Writes Hester: 'My feet made contact with ground materialised from millennia of lava flows, once liquefied, now solidified as the dominant geology of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Emerging from the body of an aircraft, I stepped onto the international airport's thin asphalt tarmac, which was as generic as any I'd seen. The standard airport aesthetic obscured any signs of the absolute specificity of this place...'

Bianca Hester is an artist and writer living and working between the unceded lands of the Wodi Wodi people of the Dharawal Nation, and the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. Her practice works at the juncture between sculpture, geology, geography and socially-engaged processes to explore cultural conditions of contested locations.