The potency of a clay pot or any pot is just amazing. That notion of emptiness is just that, a notion. Because they are not empty. They contain so much. The healing power of pots is so important. You only have to look at some of the pottery you find in Nigeria for instance, and across Africa. Those pots now in museums and viewed as sculptural pots were made as remembrance pieces, perhaps to embody someone who had died. They are very sculpture and they are very figurative...What is so beautiful about the pot is that it conveys a universal language, that of spiritual utility and aesthetic. It is revered and understood by all and therefore important to all...What else can tell you about human life more than a pot does?
Dame Magdalene Odundo is one of the most eminent ceramicists, indeed artists, to live and work in the UK today. Her work transcends time and place, inspired by a litany of diverse influences that are testament to her extraordinary intellect, breadth of knowledge and references, and her absolute dedication to clay. The exhibition, The Journey of Things, at the Hepworth Wakefield and Sainsbury Centre in 2019 was a powerful demonstration of the many and varied objects that Odundo studied and selected that together formed the body of precedents from which her insistently innovative and deeply personal craft emerges.
Born in Kenya in 1950 to a journalist father and a mother who had studied economics, the family spent time in Delhi but most of Odundo’s upbringing was in Nairobi and Mombasa on the coast. She moved to the UK in 1971 to study graphic and commercial arts at Cambridge College of Art but the Zimbabwean-born potter Zoe Ellison encouraged her to pursue making. The Modernist treasures of Kettle’s Yard, including works by Hepworth, Moore, Brancusi, Miro and Gaudier-Brzeska were formative encounters. Odundo continued her studies at the West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham in 1973 where she learnt to throw on a wheel but it was studio visits to Bernard Leach in 1974 and, most importantly, Michael Cardew in Cornwall that facilitated Odundo’s consideration of her position as maker crossing between cultures and traditions. Odundo had a two-month residency at the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja, Nigeria, established by Cardew in 1951, where she learnt to hand-build in the Gbari method, a technique traditionally employed by female potters and taught by the famed Nigerian maker Ladi Kwali.
The method of hand-building is at the heart of Odundo’s work, the process itself, like with Moore and Hepworth’s direct carving, dictating the final form.
I have been asked why I hand-build, and the answer is that hand-building is a slower process than throwing on the wheel and I need to work slowly in order to think; and I need the time to find the form I am looking for at the time of making.
Taking a ball of clay, Odundo hollows this and pulls the inner clay upwards, building up the walls and adding flattened strips of clay to add height. Through the slow and physical process of manipulating the clay, Odundo finds, or reveals, the innate character of that particular piece. The act of making is in the round, the maker herself circles around the piece, encountering the clay from all angles and she pays particular attention to the inside, smoothing the inner surface with gourd scrapers. Rather than using a glaze, Odundo employs a slip from the same clay as the vessel itself, a terra sigillata. Coated in this slip, Odundo burnishes the surface using stones and polishing tools. The extraordinary colours for which she is famed are achieved in the firing process in a gas kiln where Odundo controls the amount of oxygen to make bright orange or iridescent black.
The reliance on the fire to give the work that last movement in its dance, to give it that last touch of spirit, to transform it into something completely new is a process that all ceramicists get excited about. When the firing works, it can be magical. All of a sudden, each vessel, bowl or urn defines itself with its own identity. It is here that they establish their own lives. It is astonishing that this final cycle in the making has that power to amaze even the maker...me! Making in clay is just so magical!
It is the human (female) body that is Odundo’s constant motif:
The human body is a vessel that contains ourselves, our being human. As artists and makers of things, when we are sculpting, modelling or forming figures or containers we are echoing the vessel that is us as human containers of mind and body. The body that carries and contains the essence of life, our organs and soul all in the one vessel. It is a humanity we want to imbue in that thing we are making as an object.
As well as general anthropomorphic associations with the female body and the vessel (foot, body, neck, lip, mouth), specific references are evident in Odundo’s vessels, to both the pregnant body and the female body made through ritual and cultural traditions including the profiles of the Mangbetu women of the Democratic Republic of Congo with elongate skulls resulting from childhood binding.
Made in 1986, Untitled is one of the most beautiful of Odundo’s works to come to auction from a prestigious private collection. In the tiny foot that just makes contact with the ground to the generous bulge of the body and the angular points of the elegantly elongated neck. The profile marries the sensuous and curvaceous of below with the tapering and sharp of above. The exquisite clouds of black and orange intermingling on the beautifully burnished, alternately gleaming and matt surface, are the result of multiple firings to bring both colours together.
As Andrew Bonacina writes
Odundo was, and remains, one of the greatest voices to emerge during the flourishing of British studio ceramics in the 1980; within that narrative, her work contributed to a reshaping and enriching of its expressions and discourses. Yet her work also sits apart, its complex organic qualities finding more illuminating affinities with modernist sculpture than utilitarian ceramic traditions. Made in Britain but shaped by a global outlook, Odundo’s work pushes against any attempts to define it geographically, preferring instead to speak in a language that transcends place and time.
The work of Dame Magdalene Odundo is collected by private collectors and public institutions around the globe, from the Americas to Europe, Africa to Asia. Pieces are held in the British Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and the National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya amongst many others. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the African Art Recognition Award by Detroit Art Institute in 2008, the African Heritage Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, Nairobi, Kenya in 2012 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Ceramic Festival in 2019. She sits on the British Council Art Advisory Panel and the Royal College of Art Council and is a member of the National Museums of Kenya Nairobi’s Contemporary Art Gallery project.