MBALI MTHETHWA
MBALI MTHETHWA
Her practice considers beadwork not only as ornamentation, but as a site of knowledge production where histories of labour, gender, and cultural transmission are both preserved and reimagined. Moving between sculpture, installation, and research, her work asks how inherited forms can be disrupted, expanded, and re-authored in contemporary contexts.
We undertook a research trip to the Nazareth Baptist Church (also known as Shembe) in Inanda as part of an ongoing inquiry into cultural practice, ritual, adornment, and sound. This visit forms part of a sustained engagement with how embodied traditions function as living archives where gesture, material, and voice converge to produce meaning and continuity.
Speculative Work — isicholo Light Sculpture
A light sculpture informed by the isicholo, the cone-shaped form historically worn by married Zulu women as a marker of identity and status. Focusing on examples from 1890–1940, the work reimagines the isicholo as an illuminated structure translating adornment into form, light, and memory.
Mbali Mthethwa
Mbali Mthethwa is an artist, researcher and organiser whose work engages materiality, memory, and the politics of adornment. Through an interdisciplinary practice, she explores how traditional craft languages particularly beadwork function as living archives that carry identity, history, and transformation.
imbomu — Light Sculpture
Kiaat wood and glass beads
This sculptural work draws from the imbomu, a horn used within the Nazareth Baptist Church during praise and worship. Reimagined as a light sculpture, the work considers the object not only as an instrument of sound but as a vessel of resonance holding spiritual, communal, and sonic memory.