Hailing from one of the foremost families of Zulu ceramics, Jabulile Nala bears the memory of a line of female ceramicists that can be traced back to 1900. Born in KwaZulu-Natal, and rooted in the ceramic traditions of her mother, Nesta Nala, and her grandmother, Simphiwe Nala, Jabulile Nala creates sculptural forms which spiral wildly from their origin point in the Zulu clay heritage, at once incorporating and defying traditions. Ukhamba is the term for blackened vessels that are used during rituals within Zulu culture for serving and drinking beer; pots used for communing with the ancestors. Traditionally, the motifs that they hold extend out of a communal cosmological framework: one might glimpse the remnants of arched doorways, seen as entranceways to the womb, or sharp downward-facing triangles like pointed stakes in the ground as symbols of masculinity. Jabulile Nala has innovated even further: compressing the round belly of the ukhamba, flanking its sides with handles more commonly found on traditional meat dishes, and providing a larger surface on which to incise and sculpt a myriad of minute geometric structures. Once the ukhamba lands in the hands of Jabulile it is sodden with waves of history, heavy and warm with all the bodies that have made it. Her mother’s hand, her breath, and the bodies and spirits of the long line of mothers before, appearing in each incision, each coax, each pull of the clay. This artistic and cultural continuity is held in revolutions of form, the flashes of “idiosyncratic flare” are in fact, perhaps paradoxically, great acts of preservation. To hold the ukhamba is to remember a long tradition of art and ritual. To transform the ukhamba is to keep the pot alive, to sustain a vital force, like tending to a garden or telling a story.