Find the Joy

Seen on a recent visit to the V&A, Dundee.

Spring arrived in the northern hemisphere and with it, that particular restlessness and the impulse to fling open windows and to sort through drawers… well, to begin again. 

We call it spring-cleaning but it's older than that. Way older. It's ritual. It's the body remembering what the earth is doing: shedding the accumulated weight of winter and making room for what wants to grow.

There is something almost fierce in it. 

I grew up under a different sky, with different rhythms and a different relationship to the turning of the year. Spring here catches me off guard and it sort of asks something of me I am only beginning to understand.

There are no tidy answers.

Being here in the UK I've been taking a long honest look at my work, at who I am, at the strange and turbulent world we're all trying to navigate. 

I won't pretend I have tidy answers. I'm not sure I always know exactly what I'm trying to say. But I've reworked my website, finding new language for my practice, and in doing so, something unexpected happened.

A dear friend and colleague reached out to a small circle of trusted voices, people who know my work deeply, who've watched it evolve, who've never been afraid to be honest with me and asked them to share their thoughts.

I was not prepared for what came back.

They wrote about collaboration and intimacy, about politics of empathy, about light on skin and love as the root of all genuine artistic inquiry. They wrote about the Eastern Cape, about being an outsider-insider, about Singa bantu "We are the people" a phrase that carries its full weight in every African language.

One of them wrote, simply: "I deeply admire Pippa's work." Those five words undid me.

To everyone who responded with such generosity and depth: I am held by you. I hope you know it.

The things we let go release us.

Spring-cleaning is supposed to be about decluttering, but I have done rather the opposite. Among some boxes delivered to me this past month were the Mielie Dolls, a collection last shown in Paris in June 2023, and reuniting with them has felt like a kind of gift.

Mielie Dolls begins with a childhood memory: visits to my grandparents' farm, where Angelina, a Xhosa woman in whose charge I was, taught me to make dolls from corncobs, dressing them in scraps of old fabric. The dolls I made were given to my blind grandmother to hold, passed from one pair of hands to another, seen through touch rather than sight. She found her joy that way, through texture and form, through what the fingers could read that the eyes could not. It strikes me now, as someone whose whole practice is built on light and on what a lens can hold, that she was doing something not so different: finding the image in the dark, knowing a thing completely without ever seeing it.

Looking back, I wonder how much that childhood ritual, the choosing of fabric, the shaping of form with my hands, quietly informed everything that came after. The work I make now arrives differently… through a camera, but perhaps the impulse is the same: to render something felt into something held.

Handmade and hanging, the dolls are tender and unsettling in equal measure, stitched with affection, and yet trailing behind them a history that was never fully named.

They feel alive to me, and I don't want them to go back into storage. They belong out in the world. If you are interested in acquiring one, please email admin@pippahetherington.co.za

The River Boundary 

A season for new flow.

There is other news. A year into being in Oxfordshire, it feels somehow right that I will be part of a show here. This May, I am part of a two-person exhibition at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum called The River Boundary with the remarkable painter Anita Joice. To show work inside a British military museum feels quietly profound. The walls hold the memory of conflict and yet here we are, two women, two rivers, asking what landscapes carry and what they might release. Anita brings the Thames…I bring the Great Fish River, a colonial boundary drawn in the Eastern Cape during the long wars between the British settlers and the amaXhosa. My family descends from the 1820 Settlers who came to that contested land and my work carries that weight with it.

The River Boundary opens Saturday, 2nd May 2026, and runs until 17th May. I would love to see you there.

The world doesn't wait while we make art and write letters to each other. There is a particular porousness that comes with being an artist: the world gets in through the same door the light does.

Here is the mantra that got me through it. Every morning I looked at myself in the mirror and spoke to the person looking back. Find the joy, I said. And somehow, stubbornly (improbably) it worked.

Joy does not mean looking away from what is difficult. It means noticing the light. I am grateful, spring after spring, to keep trying.

With love, from here to wherever you are

Pippa