Cow Mothepa’s interdisciplinary practice takes her own name as both conceptual framework and method of inquiry, exploring the symbolic, cultural, and political dimensions of the black female body. Based in Pretoria, South Africa, and trained initially in sculpture and glass, her practice has since expanded to include textile, installation, and mixed media. Drawing on African naming cosmologies, Mothepa uses the figure of the cow as a metaphor through which to examine gender,labour, embodiment, value, and oppression.

Cow’s research has evolved into immersive, world-building installations shaped by nostalgia, memory, and an autoethnographic search for matrilineal lineage. Central to her practice is a feminist concern about archival absence: she questions where the histories of women in her family are preserved, given that genealogical records so often privilege patrilineal inheritance. The artist proposes alternative modes of remembering and knowledge production centred on women’s experience, contributing to contemporary conversations on feminist world-building, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the expanded possibilities of sculpture as a mode of critical inquiry. Although sculpture remains the foundation of her practice, textile art has become an increasingly vital medium through which she transmits women’s stories.

Cow has contributed to national commissions in South Africa, including a life-size figure of Francis Goitsemang Baard for the National Heritage Monument and a 2.5-metre sculpture of Oliver Tambo at OR Tambo International Airport. Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as Good Neighbours at Nirox Sculpture Park; Black Luminosity at SMAC Gallery, Stellenbosch; Back to Back They Faced Each Other at Everard Read, Cape Town; and, most recently, Great Expectations: Selected Works from the Collection of the Art Bank of South Africa at the Javett Art Centre, Pretoria.