Co-creation: reimagining the role of the artist-researcher in community

Lily Hibberd is a DECRA ARC Research Fellow in the National Institute of Experimental Arts. An interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator, her research centres on marginalised people and communities and the restoration of their histories through new forms of memory. Her projects are developed in long-term participatory art research, forming unique collaborations with communities, artists, scientists and historians.

Lily co-founded the Parramatta Female Factory Memory project in 2012 with Bonney Djuric, in collaboration with the Parragirls, a collective of surviving former residents of the Parramatta Girls Home, Western Sydney. This work enables the women to access and reconstruct their past through collaborative multidisciplinary art making to ultimately establish a ‘site of conscience’, a permanent place of recognition at the former Girls Home. Lily’s ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award project, Sentient Testimony: trauma aesthetics, digital media and memories of Parramatta Girls Home, is a practice-led research enquiry focused on digital media innovations that advance the first-hand historical witnessing of the last women survivors of this institution. 

Hibberd has won a number of major awards, including the Terra Foundation Senior Scholar Summer Fellowship, Giverny, France (2012), the 2007 Early Career Research Award, Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University, she was the National Winner of the 2000 UBS Art Award at the Whitechapel Gallery, London and won the 1999 Victorian College of the Arts Postgraduate Award from the National Gallery of Victoria Women’s Association. She is founding editor of un Magazine, an ongoing publication and community based art writing project and is represented by galerie de Roussan, Paris.