My artistic practice investigates the fragile space between memory and place. This final project, The Space Between: Resolution, concludes a year-long exploration of distance by shifting the focus from people to the artifacts that outlive them. The work centers on my grandmother’s chair and other domestic objects, which stand as silent signifiers of a personal history I am seeking to reclaim.
This project is a collaborative journey with my grandmother. She is not merely a subject but a co-director, guiding me through the landscape of my own history, from my father’s first plot to the playgrounds of my youth. Through her, I access not only places but also the profound narratives embedded in these domestic objects, whose histories are both intertwined with and older than my own.
The final diptychs present two modes of seeing. The stark, high-contrast black and white photographs represent the objective, documentary reality of these spaces, how anyone might see them. Juxtaposed with these are the softer, toned “archive” images, filtered through a personal, almost hazy lens of memory. This visual dialogue, inspired by the nuanced documentary eye of Tshepo Leballo, makes tangible the central theme of my work: the distance between the shared, external reality of a community and the intimate, internal landscape of personal memory.
The Space Between II
My artistic practice is an investigation into the physical and emotional distances that shape identity. In The Space Between II, I use digital montage to document a series of performative gestures: my attempt to occupy the postures and situations of my childhood community. The base layer of each piece is a direct photograph of community members, a testament to their reality. The superimposed, translucent layer is a self-portrait, captured as I consciously mimicked their stance and gesture.
These montages are not claims of shared experience, but rather maps of a failed, yet necessary, empathy. The slight misalignments, the awkward transparency of my own form, and the very need to layer the images speak directly to the unbridgeable gap cCreated by my own life choices. The work explores what it means to inherit a history without living its daily weight, questioning whether we can ever truly re-inhabit the spaces we’ve left.
Thato Mothobi is a visual artist from Letlhabile, Brits, in the North West province of South Africa. He is currently in his fourth year of Fine Arts at the University of Pretoria, where his practice spans photography, digital montage, printmaking and installation, united by a sustained inquiry into memory, migration and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. His work centres on the Letlhabile family archives, exploring how photographs and domestic objects carry stories across generations. His ongoing series The Space Between maps the emotional distance between leaving and returning to his childhood community, using his grandmother’s chair, family photographs and found materials to visualise the space where memory and longing meet.
Mothobi’s work has been recognised nationally. He was a Top 100 finalist at the Sasol New Signatures Competition in both 2024 and 2025, with work exhibited at the Pretoria Art Museum. In 2024, he participated in Kwelinye Elizwi in Mbabane, Eswatini, and exhibited in Angoulême, France, as part of a student exchange. His work has also been shown at the University of Pretoria’s Gallery 2.0 and Trent Gallery. In 2025, he was selected as a Top 10 participant in the Tlhagella Incubation Programme at the Javett Art Centre. The programme recognises emerging artists whose work engages deeply with themes of migration, home and exile.
Beyond his studio practice, Mothobi has demonstrated leadership in arts-based community engagement. He served as Class Representative and Project Lead for two major community art projects, the Nirox/WaterStories project and the Nicus Lodge engagement. He has also worked as a Facilitator at the Javett Art Centre, leading gallery tours and engaging diverse audiences with contemporary art. Mothobi continues to develop his practice in Pretoria, working across mediums to ask what we carry with us, what we leave behind, and what happens when we try to return.