Our Vision
GippslandCreative is an artist-led partnership between Alvina Bishop-Edwards and Valerie Hibberd, bringing together two distinctive artistic voices united by a passion for creativity, exploration and artistic expression.
We believe art has the power to tell stories, challenge perspectives, evoke emotion and create connections. Through our individual practices and collaborative projects, we create and share original artworks that reflect our curiosity about the world and invite others to see it in new ways.
Our vision is to make original art accessible, engaging and part of everyday life, connecting our creative practice with people who appreciate, enjoy and wish to live with art.
Alvina
Alvina is a Gippsland-based visual artist and arts educator, with more than four decades spent painting, drawing and exploring the stories that connect us. Her practice has moved through portraiture, mixed media and design, always returning to people, memory, place and the things we carry within us.
Alvina trained in visual art at the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education and later completed postgraduate studies in education at Monash University. Teaching and community arts have enriched her practice, deepening her interest in creativity as a way of expressing what words sometimes cannot. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and is held in private collections in Australia and overseas.
Her recent body of work, Whispers of the Forest, explores our emotional and spiritual connections with trees and the natural world. These paintings invite a closer look, revealing suggestions of memory, presence and shared life.
Alvina is now extending this inquiry through Whispers of Earth and Forest: A Journey Through Mind and Myth, exploring how experience and imagination become stories, symbols and beliefs. She wants her paintings to offer both an immediate connection and something that unfolds over time—a detail, a question or a feeling that becomes personal to the person living with it.
Valerie
Born in England, Valerie's creative journey has taken many forms, encompassing teaching, publishing, design, craft, community advocacy and academic research. Throughout these varied pursuits, a fascination with storytelling, social justice and the ways people interpret their world has remained a constant.
After migrating to Australia, Valerie completed a Bachelor of Arts at Monash University and spent thirteen years with the Gippsland Trades and Labour Council, becoming its first female President. She subsequently worked in higher education, including as a Researcher at RMIT University and as a Research Fellow at Federation University. These experiences have profoundly influenced her understanding of social inequalities, gender expectations and the ways cultural narratives shape our lives.
Working primarily in acrylics, alongside printmaking and sculpture, Valerie explores the connections between humanity, nature and imagination. Her earlier work examined environmental and social concerns, while her more recent paintings draw increasingly on mythology, folklore and the enduring power of storytelling.
A feminist perspective runs through her practice, questioning traditional representations of women and reclaiming voices often overlooked in familiar stories. Forests, trees and mythical figures become symbols of memory, resistance, transformation and belonging.
For Valerie, painting has become another form of storytelling — a way to revisit the past, challenge inherited narratives and imagine different possibilities.