Artist Statement

Hopeton St. Clair Hibbert Jr.

Hopeton St. Clair Hibbert Jr. is an Atlanta-based multidisciplinary artist whose work examines how Black memory persists through materials shaped by labor, extraction, and time. His practice is grounded in the belief that history is not only preserved in archives or monuments, but embedded in ordinary materials that have been worked, weathered, and overlooked. Through photography, sculpture, and mixed media, Hibbert approaches material as a living record, one that holds endurance, strain, and transformation.

Across his practice, Hibbert works with materials that carry cultural and historical weight: trees growing in urban environments, cotton fabrics, salvaged railroad wood, iron, and rebar. These materials are not used symbolically or illustratively; instead, they are allowed to retain their physical and historical presence. His work asks how meaning accumulates through touch, repetition, and survival, and how labor, particularly Black labor, continues to shape both the physical world and collective memory.

In London Plane Tree Study, Hibbert photographs urban tree trunks marked by age, pollution, and adaptation. These trees, shaped by human intervention yet continuing to grow, become quiet records of endurance within constrained environments. Through his “tactilized” process, layering acrylic onto photographic surfaces, Hibbert introduces physical resistance to the image. The added depth slows the act of looking, emphasizing the surface as a site where time, pressure, and care are made visible.

This inquiry into endurance becomes materially explicit in Cotton Ghosts, where Hibbert works directly with cotton fabric suspended into fragile, hovering forms. Cotton functions not as metaphor but as an unresolved material presence, one inseparable from histories of enslavement, labor, and survival. The sculptures refuse narrative closure, allowing the material to remain unsettled, carrying weight without spectacle. Memory in this work is neither distant nor complete; it lingers, shaping how the present is felt.

Hibbert’s Ode to John Henry sculptures extend this examination of labor and value through salvaged railroad wood, iron, and rebar. Referencing the African American folk hero, the works consider the enduring tension between human effort and mechanized progress. The reclaimed materials bear visible traces of use and strain, foregrounding labor as something physical, cumulative, and often erased. These sculptures function as both acknowledgment and inquiry— asking how labor is measured, remembered, and replaced.

Through a sustained engagement with material, Hibbert’s practice resists speed, efficiency, and erasure. His work asks viewers to slow down and consider how endurance is formed not through triumph, but through accumulation of marks, weight, and care. In a technological moment increasingly detached from the human hand, Hibbert insists on the continued relevance of touch, material memory, and the quiet persistence of what has been carried forward.