Excavation is a cross-section of Pippa Hetherington’s artistic practice. Anchored in photography—through the acts of taking, seeing, and relating to images—the artist embarks on a deeply personal journey, inviting us to reflect on our own.
Engaging with the medium’s ambiguous nature, it is the artist’s active intervention that reveals its complexity. By altering the state and materiality of the photograph, we 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 history, power relations, voicelessness, and choice in this body of work are laid bare—not to assign blame, but to offer healing from the trauma that often lingers within family, society, and history. Using clay pigment made from crushed rocks sourced 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 incorporating the pigment, she excavates memories, dreams, and emotions tied to her past and ancestry.
Memory & Truth
By its nature, photography captures a moment within a frame while excluding what lies beyond. Memory functions in a similar way. Revisiting family albums and childhood photographs, Hetherington questions what was preserved and what was omitted. Investigating the relationship between photography and truth, she excavates what hasn’t been recorded and examines how photographs serve as evidence for particular narratives. In this process of unearthing the past, she challenges the hidden patterns of power in an effort to repair what has been brutally taken away.
Manipulation & Authorship
By manipulating materials—transforming photographs through additional chemical processes, embracing the unpredictability of cyanotypes, or threading by hand through fabric and paper—Hetherington embraces imperfection, including her own. She reclaims authorship and constructs a new truth, a central element within Excavation. Her often unresolved work draws us closer to her practice, revealing the process and physical labor intrinsic to it. The stitch that mends the fractured yet leaves the scars visible stands in contrast to family photographs that present an illusion of wholeness. Excavation, ultimately, is driven by the urge to know—to uncover what has been concealed, to release what has been repressed. “I have to be prepared not to like what I might find, and in the process of retrieving something that has been buried, it is important to take care in how I extract the experience” says Pippa.