Kim Hicks’s most recent One Woman show – launched in 2006

‘Hers was the Earth’ was commissioned by the Bristol City Museum for a performance to celebrate Amelia Edwards 175th birthday on June 7th 2006. The style of this show is a new departure for Kim; this is the first time she has created a piece that is, in effect, a biography.

Amelia Edwards was hugely talented in many ways, as an artist, a musician and a writer, but her enduring legacy was to set up the Egyptian Exploration Fund, an organisation still in existence today. Visiting Egypt at the age of 42 almost by accident, she was completely overcome by what she saw and by a desire to help protect the amazing artefacts that she saw being destroyed by ignorance and greed. The rest of her life was devoted to that cause.

In the first half of the show Kim plays 4 different women who each played, at various times, a very important role in Amelia Edwards’s life, including her mother, Alicia Edwards, and her travelling companion, Lucy Renshaw. In this way we get to see how others may have viewed this exceptional woman. Each chooses a different piece of Amelia’s writing to illuminate their relationship with her and so, throughout, Amelia’s own voice is heard.

In the second half Kim becomes the woman herself and so she finally speaks directly to us. The whole show is not only a chance to learn about an amazing and highly influential woman ( from a period when, for a woman to achieve that much required breathtaking determination) but it is a powerful reminder of what it really means to find your passion in life.