Ilifa Eliqhekezayo I: Ukulawulo (Inherited fractures I: To control), 2026
Clay
4 Part: 14 cm x 45 cm x 45 cm
Artist’s Statement
Ilifa eliqhekezayo is an ongoing sculptural meditation on masculinity, inheritance, and the unfinished labour of becoming. Emerging from my experience of growing up without a consistent paternal presence and later undergoing Xhosa initiation, the work inhabits the space between what manhood is expected to be and what it often feels like: uncertain, vulnerable, and perpetually in transition.
The bull serves as a symbolic self-portrait. Within Xhosa cultural life, it is an animal bound to sacrifice, dignity, kinship, and memory. Through its form, I reflect on the burden of constructing an identity without a clear blueprint to inherit. Bent postures, lowered gazes, and constricted forms become quiet embodiments of emotional weight, of carrying histories that cannot always be named, and expectations that cannot always be met.
The first sculpture in the series fractured unexpectedly during its making. Cracks spread across its surface and its structure began to fail. What initially appeared as a technical setback slowly revealed itself as a form of testimony. The fractures became more than material ruptures; they echoed the invisible breaks left by absence, inherited trauma, and the instability of building oneself from incomplete foundations.
From these wounds, the second sculpture emerged. Armed with the lessons of the first, I deliberately introduced fissures and disruptions into the form while preserving its strength. The crack transformed from accident into language, from failure into intention. It became a mark of survival rather than collapse.
These sculptures operate, in many ways, as a visual diary. Each one records a negotiation between destruction and repair, inheritance and self-determination. I am the bull, carrying the weight of expectation, but I am also the hand that sacrifices it, questioning, dismantling, and remaking the inherited scripts of masculinity. Through this process, I do not seek wholeness. Instead, I remain attentive to the fractures themselves, recognising them not as defects to be hidden, but as traces of a becoming that is still unfolding.
