Hester Lyon

Hester Lyon is an arts worker, curator, and writer based on Wilyakali Country in Broken Hill. Through relationships with people and place, Hester has established a curatorial practice that responds to the specificities of Far West NSW’s ecology and politics and the conditions this creates for art making. As an arts worker and curator, she sees herself as a conduit for artists to access opportunities, subjecting them to the least amount of bureaucracy as possible.

Hester is interested in alternative organisational models that centre agency of community and place. In 2023, she co-founded Slag Heap Projects with Verity Nunan and Asma d. Mather. Slag Heap Projects is an artist-run initiative in Broken Hill which wants to understand increasingly complex cultural frictions by facilitating experimentation and place-based research.

Most recently, Hester was Curator at Broken Hill City Art Gallery where she supported international, national and local artists to develop and present group and solo exhibitions. In 2022, she curated returning to a subject through a lifetime, a new commission and collection exhibition which marked the re-opening of the Broken Hill City Art Gallery after a period of renovations and reflected on the implicit biases of the collection and the histories embedded in the gallery’s architecture.

Hester was selected as one of 80 participants for Regional Arts Australia’s Artlands 2023 and presented, alongside Verity Nunan, at Groundfloor in Kandos in March 2024. Hester is currently Project Officer at West Darling Arts and her most recent essay ‘Art and Broken Hill: A-grader, B-grader, Slag Heap’ was published in Artlink’s Issue 44:2: Regional.