About

Pippa Charlesworth is a site-specific artist working within heritage, conservation, and sustainability. Her practice explores the interplay between materials and environments — how objects and surfaces can carry the memory of a place, and how small acts of collecting, combining, and photographing can transform them into carriers of meaning.

Process and concept are central. Each project begins with a deep engagement with a specific site — its archives, its materials, its stories — and develops through iterative acts of making that distil meaning with each stage. Sculpture, photography, cyanotype, plaster, and textiles are all part of a practice that moves fluidly between disciplines.

Her year-long residency at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard became an investigation into how administrative processes shape the physical fate of buildings — working with restricted Ministry of Defence blueprints, exploring concealment and revelation through material transformation.

Drawing on Robert Smithson’s idea of “site and non-site,” her work bridges the raw reality of a location with its representation elsewhere — opening up questions about how archives are formed, how objects are selected for preservation, how value is assessed, and by whom.