In Zizipho Poswa’s practice, each vessel tells a story. Coiled up by hand, the story is spun in layers. It is cyclical. It is a story that has already been told. It is a story that will be told again. The colours threaded in those coils are like events strung on a narrative. The base holds something of a prophecy; the crown is a sort of ending. Were we to apply narrative to this process, Poswa’s practice would tell a story that begins with the human and ends with the gods. Human – because its base is small enough to fit on the crown of your head. Divine – because its crown, a pair of brass horns, reaches out to pierce the heavens.

A story told a thousand times becomes tradition. Sometimes, a tradition is a story that does not need to be told. No longer in need of language, it comes embedded, embodied. It can be seen in the way Poswa makes a ceramic vessel. Like a traditional pot, it is hand-coiled and burnished. Often, the vessel is large, sometimes over half a metre tall, a scale that recalls the ukhamba, a pot that can hold twenty litres of beer. Like a traditional vessel, Poswa’s base starts small – small enough to balance on top of your head – expands around the belly, and narrows again at the lip. What distinguishes them as distinctly modern – and distinctly Poswa – is that these vessels are sealed. Atop their heads, crowns: hairstyles, horns, bowls, amadumbe, ikhetshemiya. Rather than contain, they carry. Umthwalo is the practice of carrying a heavy load on one’s head – be it wood, water, or laundry – often across great distances. It refers to both the load carried and the act of carrying it. The strength and the burden. Traditionally, it is women’s practice, something Poswa witnessed as a young girl growing up in the Eastern Cape.

Its smooth surface recalls the skin of the dead, the living, and the as-yet-to-be-born. So that we might run our palm across it and count the hand-slipped lines like days. Indeed, the vessel is not obliged to have a beginning or end. It contains. The vessel keeps all time together, so that all generations are companions, though not without friction.