Curator and writer Clare Patrick reflects on Pippa Hetherington’s transcontinental practice, tracing how her photography, textile and embodied research practice instigates a dialogue between South Africa and the United Kingdom.
Pippa Hetherington and Alice Kettle, Installation view of ‘Soft Power’, 2025. Courtesy RWA Bristol and AlastairBrookes – KoLABStudios
A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened.
The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that
something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.
– Susan Sontag, On Photography
Here is a spiral that rounds out, from a centre which shifts as the artist moves. Dialogic but situational, Pippa Hetherington pivots around central pillars of a practice formed by project-oriented yet thematic considerations. With movement as affective re-orientation, her conceptualisation in photographic making thinks past the literal and geographic. On a bleary, biting Wednesday, I stumbled into the William Morris Museum in Walthamstow, London. Angolan British artist Alida Rodrigues, Pippa Hetherington, and I had scheduled a catch-up and walk-through of William Morris & Art from the Islamic World— a curious foil to many of the material methodologies we were each thinking through in recent projects. We talked our way through the exhibition – discussing the pairings of textile, influence and motif.
Where Sara Ahmed argues that our bodies become ‘habituated’ to certain spaces, moving beyond expectation has become the curious development in Hetherington’s practice while working between the UK and South Africa. By locating her practice within the UK, she confronts a new interaction between community and record across the histories of empire. In doing so, she explores how to make the familiar strange, using her own movement to unsettle inherited colonial orientations.
Pippa Hetherington (b. 1971) is a South African photographic artist working between and through geographies, heritage and land.Her practice can be defined by a dialogue between the recorded image and the materiality of the handmade. As a conceptual anchor, the provocation of return, belonging, and of situational experience grounds her lens-based work in a deeply collaborative, relational and layered process. Hetherington’s work is defined by experiential research by embedding in landscapes and communities. She thinks beyond the photographic frame, integrating textiles and natural clay pigments to create layered, tactile objects. These material gestures act as both extensions and disruptions of the image, evoking a dialogue between (inter)action, land and the body. 
Pippa Hetherington, In Clay We Wear (prototypes), 2025. Handmade white cotton dress, ochre pigment, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
By interweaving photography, textiles, and recorded performances, her work is intrinsically multidisciplinary. Hetherington’s focus on tactility offers a counter to Susan Sontag’s presumption that “a photograph passes for incontrovertible proof.” Disrupting flat, singular surfaces, Hetherington questions the idea of the photograph as a stable, objective record. Rather, the image is a starting point for exploring subjective, situational, and layered “truths.” Similarly, Hetherington’s practice demonstrates an interest in thinking through and with. As Donna Haraway prompts, “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots…” Taking this somewhat literally in her portrait series Interlaced (2022), Hetherington’s commitment to engaging image and textile offers conceptual grounding in the material conditions of representation’s knots. Her conceptual focus centres on themes of erasure, grief, and belonging, resulting in works of careful pointedness which resonate across complex discourses on land, memory, and access.
Hetherington notes in Reading the Thread that she is a fifth-generation South African, confronting an understanding of identity which has been formed and sedimented in a place over time. Now, establishing her practice in both South Africa and England, she recounts, “I keep being asked what it’s like to ‘come back’ – as though this should automatically be a homecoming for me”. While working in the UK is not a return of her own, it presents a moment to dialogue with the soil her ancestors departed from. As Hetherington navigates between territories, it becomes pertinent to confront the legibility of ‘home’ within the empire. Palestinian writer Nasrin Himada’s Programming the Diaspora: On How the Moving Image Shapes the Present resonates broadly amid this era of global migrations. “What kind of time frame constitutes a return?”, Himada asks, “how does it unsettle colonial narratives and engage with expressions of nonbelonging? If return informs how we carry and translate our love for our lands through our relationships and through our anti-colonial work, then how does it expand the notion of solidarity?” 
Pippa Hetherington, Stitch #1, 2020. Mixed media textile, 200 x 200cm. Courtesy of the artist.
With long-standing collaborations rooted in South African land and culture, alongside a documentary photography career, Hetherington’s presence in new landscapes is informed by an impasto-like approach to creating. Thinking through generational linkages to soil and record, Hetherington’s scope continues to expand. Achille Mbembe’s framing of ‘record’ in the ‘postcolony’—in which photography remains incriminated—offers a poignant site of political and territorial contestation. For Hetherington, the textile can be a surface that bears witness. By transposing photographs onto substrates like raw cotton, silk, or clay-infused paper, she creates a fragile, porous skin for, or with, the image. The resulting object becomes a site where patterns are made visible and tactile. The textile functions as a surface where grief and memory, articulated by Ahmed as ‘sticking’ to bodies and objects, are made present. From woven prints to reconstituted costume-like pieces, she treats the image as a starting point to expand from, insisting on the physicality of construction in projects. This methodological approach manifested in Cuttings 1820–2020, recently shown at the RWA in Bristol.
Alice Kettle and Lesley Millar’s curation of the exhibition presented an opportunity to engage dialogically with practitioners working similarly from different contexts, grappling with varied questions that presented historical overlaps. Anecdotally, Millar reflected that Cuttings 1820–2020 “came to be hugely emblematic of the ideas we wanted to ‘materialise’ in the exhibition.” The show, which centred on cloth-based work, was reviewed as “a unique intersection of art, culture and lived experience”. Cuttings 1820–2020 was acquired by the Spier Art Collection. Housed in their significant collection, the work is situated within a curated vocabulary of South Africa’s visual cultural history and its complexities. The collection acknowledges drawing on the Hetherington’s collaborative approach “connecting artists from around the country with embroiderers at Keiskamma Art Project”, further stating that, “it was through the acquisition of Cuttings 1820-2020 for the Spier Art Collection that this idea of a new collaboration opportunity for fine artists was born”.
Informed by her shifting geographical perspective to explore her relationships across the global South and European art contexts, Hetherington is currently developing a new body of work. Continuing to think across two territories, she has begun building a project that thinks through the emotional responses experienced towards Cuttings 1820-2020 when it was exhibited in Bristol. Titled Between Two Grounds, the project explores an interlinking set of visual questions. Presenting traces in landscapes and portrait photography, Hetherington explores sites of resilience. From departure points across opposing hemispheres, she reflects on contested landscapes in South Africa and the UK. Double-exposure images on transparent fabric create ghostly, elusive forms. A garment encrusted with red clay of the Eastern Cape is presented in a durational video performance. Embroidered gold threads evoking trade and extraction, juxtapose beauty with the historical weight embedded in narratives of colonial navigation and consequence. 
Pippa Hetherington, Slide #4, 2018. From set of 6, Cotton, 15.5 x 10cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Thinking through transmission and transfusion, earthly and environmental relationships have become fundamental to Hetherington’s methodology. Tracing steps, routes and transplantations, the project is unfolding across South Africa’s breadth and British colonial shockwaves. Focusing on wars between the British and the amaXhosa, the works reflect land through hue and material: from rocky grey coastlines to terracotta tones and misty hues in the Eastern Cape. It is a visual layering of fragmented narratives, where individual strands of history might be stitched together, forming a complex, dense surface that makes space for resilience and connection through collective experience.
Exploring dynamics of past and present, personal and collective, South African and British inheritance, Hetherington’s work sits with the push-pull of trouble. Drawing on Haraway’s directive of resisting paralysis to remain, confront, and reorient, Hetherington grapples with the duality of standing between two histories. Reverberating through colonial history and traditions of making, her work presents both a personal inheritance and a wider narrative that speaks to questions of land, belonging, and contested memory.
Grounded in a methodology of experiential research, developed over her decades-long collaborative practice in South Africa, her work manifests from photography as an inquiry into the physical, into embodied knowledge and learning. She maintains an evolving, dedicated and iterative practice: where the work is continuously evolving in relationship to previous works, others, and to land. Through dialogue, Hetherington opens her work up to ideas of experiential process, honouring knowledge production and care through image-making, archival research, and community interaction.
Pippa Hetherington and Alice Kettle, Installation view of ‘Soft Power’, 2025, Courtesy RWA Bristol and AlastairBrookes – KoLABStudios
Bibliography
- Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others and the Ethics of Alienation. London: Routledge, 2000.
- Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
- Himada, Nasrin. “Programming the Diaspora: On How the Moving Image Shapes the Present.” In Companion to Experimental Cinema, edited by Federico Windhausen. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019.
- Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
- Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
Clare Patrick is a curator, writer, and educator focusing on installation art and transdisciplinary practices. Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, she is guided by collaborative spatial intervention as critical praxis. Her research has explored art historiography, the cultural work of transnational memory, and reparative responsibility within institutions and collections. Her practice has unfolded in exhibitions and workshops across South Africa, the UK, France, Ireland, the US, and Morocco and has been featured in publications including ArtForum, Vogue, Contemporary&, NXTHVN, No!Wahala Magazine, AWARE, and the British Journal of Photography. She currently lives and works between Paris and Cape Town.
