Erika Hibbert is a South African visual artist whose work has been exhibited across three continents. Her creative expression was shaped by an early childhood spent living in a lighthouse, with regular excursions into the bush that rooted a lifelong love for nature. Alongside her studio practice, Erika Hibbert has dedicated her career to teaching and community engagement. She taught drawing at community colleges in Soweto and collaborated on vital inner-city art initiatives in Johannesburg, including Spaza Art and Artist Proof Studio. Her commitment to teaching individuals who were denied formal arts education under apartheid anchored her practice within the society around her. Following the establishment of a democratic South Africa in 1994, Hibbert contributed to culturally transformative initiatives, including developing a new national arts curriculum. Following the passing of her husband, she relocated to Botswana in 2004, exhibiting at the National Museum in Gaborone and expanding her solo exhibitions into Europe while maintaining exhibition ties to South Africa. In 2009, Hibbert moved to the United States with her two daughters. During a decade spent in Atlanta, her work was featured in institutions such as the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, as well as the university galleries of Georgia State and Emory University. Now based in New Rochelle, New York, she continues to create and exhibit her work both locally and internationally.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Erika Hibbert’s artistic practice spans printmaking, drawing, painting and photography. Hibbert’s artwork juxtaposes abstraction and figuration, mirroring the tensions in her conceptual investigations into nature and culture, longing and belonging.
Though her conceptual premises are fluid, Erika Hibbert consistently returns to the themes of home and displacement. While these ideas are rooted in her autobiography as an immigrant, her work expands outward to engage human connectedness and dependency more broadly. ‘Exploring nostalgia and longing, I probe our human links to nature and research ideas relating to human alienation from nature.’ She notes that as humans manipulate the natural world making artificial environments and objects (such as the very art objects she produces), we become suspended between our physical, animal origins and a psychological preoccupation with isolation and mortality. To codify these ideas, Hibbert utilizes a personal lexicon of symbols; notably, the simple form of a bowl that serves as a shorthand representation of human culture, working to both celebrate and critique the act of cultural production. Hibbert views her practice as a way of processing and expressing the human experience of yearning.