There’s something particularly unnerving about encountering hair where it doesn’t belong. On a pillow, yes, if it doesn’t belong to your partner or child. In a drain, reluctantly. In food, definitely. But sculpted, monumentalised, elevated into art — that’s an entirely different matter. It asks you to reconsider the material not as something shed, but as something carried. Something that remembers and something that memorialises.
Queen Motlatle has spent a career exploring hair. She’s a South African hair, makeup, and prosthetics designer recognised for her transformative work in film, television, and live events. She is also the founder and creative director of House of Queen, which has elevated African artistry to global acclaim through her mastery of cultural authenticity and technical innovation.
Known for her meticulous work on the historical television series Shaka iLembe, Motlatle has built a reputation not merely as a hair and makeup artist, but as a cultural translator — someone who understands that the surface is more than that. Hair, in her hands, is biography and geography. It is, as she puts it, “a map to your soul”.
Her latest work, Isicholo: Crown of Ancestral Unity (2025), exhibited recently at Kunsthalle München in Munich, Germany, takes that philosophy and hardens it into form — quite literally. Drawing on the 18th-century Zulu bridal hairstyle, the isicholo, Motlatle has created something that is sculpture, but also archive and a quiet act of defiance.
Historically, the isicholo wasn’t just decorative. It was a social contract rendered in hair. Built over years, beginning at puberty and culminating in marriage, it incorporated the strands of mothers, aunts and sisters — a wearable genealogy. A bride didn’t walk alone; she wore her people.
Today, as Motlatle observes with a kind of weary pragmatism, the ritual has thinned. “Life has moved,” she says. Where once neighbours contributed hair, now they contribute cash, tucked into modern hairstyles or handed over in envelopes. The gesture remains, but the material intimacy has been lost — replaced by something more transactional, less corporeal.
Motlatle’s response isn’t nostalgic, it’s resurrection. “What I’m trying to do is restore the tradition,” she says. “To make sure that it’s known, remembered, felt — and passed on.” Hers is the language of someone who understands that culture doesn’t vanish dramatically; it erodes slowly, replaced by convenience and trend. Her work becomes a form of insistent resistance.
To recreate the isicholo, she uses synthetic Afro-textured fibre, meticulously shaped over wire, an architectural intervention that collapses centuries of ritual into a contemporary object. It’s not, she emphasises, anyone’s actual hair. The symbolism remains intact, but the medium adapts — a compromise between authenticity and feasibility that mirrors the broader tension in her work: preservation versus reinvention.
“My work speaks to both,” she says. “It’s about that meeting point — where tradition and contemporary expression come together.”
There’s a physical gravity to the work — a sense that the piece carries more than its own weight, amplified by the use of ubovu, the red ochre historically used to dye the isicholo. In Zulu cosmology, the pigment isn’t merely aesthetic; it signifies protection, transformation, sacrifice — the blood that binds families through ritual slaughter and shared ceremony.
Motlatle incorporates it with care, ensuring it remains “alive, not dry,” a phrase that feels more philosophical than practical. The aim is not museum preservation, but reanimation.
But for all its historical fidelity, the work speaks most urgently to the present. Motlatle describes it as a tribute to “forgotten matriarchs” — not abstract figures, but the unnamed women whose labour, rituals and identities have been absorbed into history without acknowledgement. “To remember them is to ensure that what they carried isn’t lost,” she says.
Here, her work intersects with the increasingly global conversation around reclaiming African narratives — not as anthropological curiosities, but as living, evolving forms. Showing at Kunsthalle München is strategic - a placement in a major European institution reframes the work from local tradition to global discourse.
Motlatle is aware of the stakes. “It opens doors — not just for me, but for other artists,” she says. And the reception has been striking. European audiences, she says, engage with the work not as outsiders, but as participants. They listen, read, connect the narrative threads — from the shaving of a young girl’s hair at puberty to its reintegration at marriage — and find some resonance. “You’d be surprised by how deeply it was felt,” she says, adding that the work invites understanding rather than demanding it.
Now that she’s back on home soil, there’s the question of what she’ll do next. Motlatle mentions, almost in passing, that she’s created over 2,000 pieces — a body of work that suggests not a career, but an archive waiting to be revealed. A solo exhibition seems inevitable.
For now, though, Isicholo stands as both culmination and beginning. A crown — and a provocation.
In a world adept at commodifying culture into something wearable but empty, Motlatle offers a reminder that identity isn’t individual but collective. Whether we like it or not, we’re made of other people, and alongside them. And sometimes, the past doesn’t fade away behind us. It shows up, being worn.
This article was first published in Sunday Times Lifestyle.
