EXCAVATION
A solo show by Pippa Hetherington | curated by Nisha Merit vC
Excavation is a cross-section of Pippa Hetherington’s artistic practice.
Anchored in photography, by way of taking, seeing and relating to images, the artist follows a deeply personal journey and invites us to reflect on our own. Dealing with the medium's ambiguous nature, it is the artist's active intervention that reveals the complexity of it. By altering the state and materiality of the photograph, we can explore its extended meaning - tracing the story beyond the frame.
Using concepts of Power & History, Memory & Truth, Manipulation & Authorship the exhibition renders each embodiment as one decisive piece of a larger story.
POWER & HISTORY
The layers of histories, power relations, voicelessness and choice in this body of work are laid bare not in order to blame but to offer healing from the trauma that often lingers within family, society and history. Using clay pigment made from crushed rocks from a historically painful site of colonial rule in South Africa, Hetherington draws parallels to a one-sided history-telling, a version of someone’s desired truth. By using the pigment, she excavates memories, dreams and feelings about her past and ancestry.
MEMORY & TRUTH
Photography by its nature depicts something within a frame while excluding what lies beyond. Memory works in a similar way. By revisiting family albums and photos from her childhood, Hetherington questions what was kept. Looking at photography and truth, the artist excavates what hasn’t been recorded and how photographs are used as evidence for a particular narrative. In this process of mining the past, she challenges the patterns of power that lies within the hidden to repair things that have brutally been taken away.
MANIPULATION & AUTHORSHIP
By manipulating the material, transforming the photograph through an additional chemical process, using the unpredictability of cyanotypes or threading by hand through fabric and paper, Hetherington embraces imperfection, including her own. She takes authorship and recreates a new truth, a central link within Excavation. Hetherington’s often unresolved work draws us closer to her practice, the process and physical labour that is intrinsic to her work. The stitch that mends the fractured but shows the scars - unlike the family photos that speak of a whole.
Excavation, subsequently is the urge to know - there is something that needs to be shown, released and freed from being covered up. “I have to be prepared not to like what I might find, and in the process of getting to something that has been buried, it is important to take care of how I extract the experience" Pippa Hetherington
Pippa Hetherington
(1971, South Africa) is a South African visual artist who has worked in lens based work and documentary over the last two decades.
Her art practice addresses post-colonial identity, fragments of separated histories, trauma and memory. Working with photography, textiles and rock pigment, she explores stories around loss, grief and remembrance.
By excavating collective and personal memory and working with fragmented recollection Hetherington reflects on the pieces in history storytelling that are so often buried or erased purposefully, forcefully or conveniently.
Amplifying tiny slivers of history she reveals what is deemed invisible, a metaphor of overlooked detail.
Hetherington graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts with distinction from ICP-Bard, New York in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Contemporary African Photography prize in 2021 and 2022.
Nisha Merit
(1987, Germany) is an independent curator, writer and artist liaison working between Johannesburg and Berlin.
Her practice is based on Care as a modality in the intersections of curatorial and artistic practices, creating interstitial spaces for knowledges and processes to be articulated and shared.
Her current research practice looks at Soil as an active political, social and cultural participant. The granular aspect of the physical and digital becomes the playground of a multitude of narratives and explorations.
She is the founder and curator of Courtyard Screening, a monthly engagement with the moving image and conversations with their makers in Johannesburg and she is the founder of Merit Art Collective, an international art collective working towards an interdisciplinary knowledge transfer and activations through art productions.