Mcijo Qondile II, 2026, Painted mild steel . 2100 × 1000 × 1000 mm.. Hyde Park.
Commissioned through Guns and Rain Gallery
Mcijo Qondile II continues my exploration of isiZulu practices as a methodology for contemporary art-making. The sculpture centres on umcijo, a triangular motif found on isiZulu beer vessels that functions as a system of visual language, authorship, regional identity, and encoded meaning.
The work speculates on the evolution of isiZulu material culture, using isibheqe sohlamvu—an isiZulu syllabary—as a visual and material language. Laser-cut into mild steel and extended beyond legibility, these forms become abstract patterns of repetition, geometry, and tessellation.
Through this transformation, the sculpture considers how Indigenous knowledge and material culture have been filtered through Western systems of description, display, and custodianship. It seeks moments of redress, restoration, and reconnection between material and metaphysical worlds, and across past, present, and future.
Mcijo Qondile, iscamtho for “all is appropriate,” reflects the work’s speculative gesture: imagining ubuZulu and isintu not as static traditions, but as living and generative systems of knowledge.
Process
