Erika Hibbert

As a visual artist in Johannesburg, South Africa from the 1980s until the early 2000s, Erika Hibbert taught drawing at colleges in Soweto (Funda and Pelmama), and in inner-city community art projects (The Artists Proof Studio and Spaza Art). In 2004 Hibbert left South Africa, moving to Botswana where her work became introspective and she explored more unconventional media and abstract content. In 2009 Hibbert immigrated to Georgia, USA. While based in Atlanta she exhibited in museums (Rosa Parks, Alabama) and universities (GSU and Emory). In 2020 Erika Hibbert moved to New York where she now resides.

"The conceptual premise of my work is naturally in flux, but over the years I have returned repeatedly to consider ideas related to belonging, home, and longing. I understand these ideas stem from my own biography but my work also expands beyond my own narrative to engage ideas of human connectedness and dependency more broadly. Exploring nostalgia and longing, I have probed human links to nature and researched ideas relating to human alienation from nature. The essence of this state of alienation seems to reside in the concept of Culture: Distancing ourselves from nature through the manipulation of nature to make human environments and objects, we find ourselves suspended between our origins as primarily physical creatures and our preoccupations with thought, loneliness, and mortality."