Pippa Hetherington (1971, South Africa) is an exhibiting artist in our summer exhibition, Soft Power: Lives told through textile art.  

Hetherington’s collaborative piece, Cuttings 1820-2020, is comprised of 10 garments, mostly dresses, that hang suspended in the centre of the RWA Sharples Gallery. Each was made by a group of five women, including Hetherington, in a mix of fabrics with clashing textures and patterns, and together they create a striking display.  

We spoke to Pippa to find out more about the inception of the project, its collaborative nature and the experience of sitting with the painful histories which inform this artwork.  

Your work is a cross generational collaboration – can you tell us about how this project came about? 

Cuttings 1820–2020 is less a cross-generational project than an intercultural one. It was born out of a personal reckoning with my own ancestry, and a desire to explore history through the lens of post-colonial South Africa. After more than two decades of working alongside women descended from the amaXhosa people of the Eastern Cape, whose ancestors had been in conflict with mine, British settlers of 1820, I realised that our shared history held unspoken stories yearning to be told. 

The 1820 settlers, promised land by the colonial government, were invited to populate the Eastern Cape with British culture, unaware that they were stepping into a landscape shaped by a series of devastating frontier wars. Few people today know the extent of the subjugation that the amaXhosa faced during those nine wars across a century. 

Rather than tell our stories separately, we chose to tell them together, through women's voices, through dress-making. We created garments as acts of conversation, of reparation. Using a mix of English lace, isiShweshwe, African wax cloth, velvet, and other fabrics, we sought to reflect the migratory journeys of cloth and the way different cultures claim and repurpose fabric. The textures, origins, and symbolism of each piece of material became part of a wider dialogue, about history, identity, and cultural entanglement. 

Image: Alastair Brookes/KoLAB

What was your experience like working with the Keiskamma Art Project? 

The Keiskamma Art Project (K.A.P.) was founded by Dr Carol Hofmeyr, a humanitarian and trained fine artist whose profound sensitivity to human suffering has shaped the ethos of the project. Her ability to facilitate healing through the collective act of art-making has been a deep source of inspiration to me. Rooted in empathy and resilience, her vision continues to influence the ways in which art can serve as both testimony and transformation. I’ve had a long-standing relationship with K.A.P., as a photojournalist, documentary maker, curator, and supporter, but this was the first time we truly collaborated in depth. The project brought together four extraordinary women from the project, Nozeti Makhubalo, Nomonde Mtandana, Nomfundo Makhubalo and Nothandile Bopani, and myself, in a series of workshops and residencies that allowed for a deeply immersive and authentic creative exchange. 

Each day began with intimate discussions, often guided by archival images and materials from the 1800s, which helped anchor our conversations around memory, clothing, and lived experience. At times, these dialogues were painful, unearthing shared grief and ancestral trauma. But there was also laughter, recognition, and a profound sense of connection. In many ways, the project became as much about the emotional bonds forged between us as it was about the artworks themselves. We stitched memory into cloth, and found joy even in the shadow of sorrow. 

Nozeti Makhubalo, one of the artists involved with the project, talks about the experience of the making the dresses: 

What do you hope your audience takes away from seeing and experiencing the work? 

At its core, this work is about dialogue and community - ongoing, imperfect, and essential. The dresses aren’t flawless, nor are they meant to be. Some seams are visible, some fabrics frayed, and the labels intentionally left showing. These elements are part of the narrative: they speak to imperfection, to transparency, to the process of mending rather than erasing. 

I hope that viewers come away with a sense of the work as a form of visual conversation between cultures, between histories, between women across time. It’s a way of bearing witness to the scars, acknowledging them, and continuing to speak of them, not as final wounds, but as openings for expression, understanding, and artistic response. 

You can see Cuttings 1820-2020 in Soft Power: Lives told through textile art.