Valerie Hibberd is a Gippsland-based visual artist whose work explores the natural world, mythology, folklore, memory and the stories that shape the way we understand ourselves and our place in the world.

Born in the small English village of Harborough Magna and raised in Coventry, Valerie moved to Australia in her early thirties. After living in a number of places, she now calls Gippsland, home. Her unconventional path to becoming an artist has taken her through a remarkably varied working life—from her first job in a local supermarket at fourteen to eventually working as a university research fellow.

Creativity, however, has always been a constant. In recent years Valerie has been able to devote herself more fully to visual art, exploring sculpture and printmaking before increasingly focusing on painting.

Her work moves between the real and imagined and can take quite different visual directions. In her current body of work, Whispers of the Forest, forests, trees and animals sit alongside mythical figures, ancient symbols and elements drawn from folklore and contemporary storytelling. These works explore cultural memory, our connection with nature and the importance of continuing to tell the stories that have travelled through generations.

Alongside this work, Valerie is developing Museum of Manufactured Girls, a very different series centred on dolls, particularly those of the 1950s. Beneath their nostalgic and sometimes innocent appearance, the dolls become symbols of the expectations placed upon girls and women—the roles they were encouraged to inhabit and the ideals of femininity they were expected to accept. The series reflects Valerie’s interest in how identity can be shaped by the stories, images and expectations a culture passes on.

Although visually different, these bodies of work share a common thread: an interest in what we inherit. Whether through ancient mythology, childhood objects, cultural expectations or our relationship with the natural world, Valerie’s paintings ask us to look again at familiar stories and consider what they preserve, what they teach us—and what we might choose to question.

Her work embraces beauty, mystery and imagination, but often there is another story waiting beneath the surface.