Magdalene Odundo stands before a row of her glossy-skinned ceramic works in the upper part of her Farnham studio and appraises a group of recent pieces. The vessels rise up from her worktop at waist height – body and neck – and she studies them as though face to face. ‘I start relating them to characters,’ she says, tracing the swoops and angles of the spaces between the pieces with her finger. ‘They’re like members of a circus, or an ensemble.’
The studio, which is connected to Odundo’s house, nestles within a garden of fleshy-leaved shrubs, at the margin where town dissolves into agricultural landscape. After 12 years here, Odundo cherishes the birdsong, the visits from silent deer, and the seed pods and squash that the lush, tranquil location brings her. Born in Nairobi in 1950, she has a long connection to Farnham: it was here that she came in 1976, after an art foundation course in Cambridge, to study ceramics, printmaking and photography at West Surrey College. It was from here, too, that she travelled to Uganda to research traditional coiling and firing techniques for her dissertation. Then followed a period teaching at the Commonwealth Institute in London, before, finally, an MA at the Royal College of Art, during which she developed the highly burnished, refined working style that has been sought after since the early 1980s.
As the art world has learned to love clay over the past decade, so Odundo’s star has risen. Following a retrospective at Hepworth Wakefield in 2019, she has become a feature of exhibitions celebrating the sculptural possibilities of ceramics. Newly returned from a group show at the Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples, next week Odundo leaves to install works for the Venice Biennale. This autumn her work will appear alongside that of contemporary artists around the world at a major Hayward Gallery exhibition.
Odundo’s studio extends from her home like the journey of an idea, travelling from inspiration to execution. First comes a warm office lined with books and catalogues, then a studio of sketching and drawing, where she hangs out with newly fired works for a while before they leave for a new home. This middle space is strung with vessels and containers of all kinds: a cabinet full of model boats belonging to her late partner; a basket of seed pods, dried squash and mermaids’ purses; sealed bundles of precious magic objects; a tobacco pouch; and a wooden travel box.
Odundo pauses to admire a hide water carrier from Kenya with a satisfying forked wooden stopper: ‘Somebody has taken the trouble to sculpt it: it reminds me of an extension of the neck and the head of an animal, or gathered, braided hair. It has an elegant proud attitude, like it’s been dressed with necklaces, and then balloons out like an operatic costume.’ The bulbous body and craning neck relate to some of the forms she explores in her ceramic work, as does the attitude. Her sketchbooks reveal Odundo drawing inspiration, too, from seed pods, birds and bodies. All inform her lexicon of curves.
The final studio is the business end, home to a gas and an electric kiln, great bins of red clay, sacks of wood shavings and wiped-down tables of tools. After almost 40 years, she says, the technical aspect of making is intuitive and cumulative, a combination of ‘acquired knowledge and the knowledge that continues to be acquired. It’s to do with the forms and getting the finishes that complement the forms.’
Odundo fires her works many times to achieve the tone she feels best fits each piece. Many are wholly or partially carbonised, with an intense black lustre on the surface. Inside the kiln stand two wide- mouthed, round-bellied vessels, golden caramel red after their first firing. Their burnished skin is so flawless and silken they look childlike, like a pair of sisters, emerging into the light. ‘And then they get destroyed by age!’ she says with a laugh. ‘They need to age like I’m ageing!’ Transforming and expanding incrementally, her practice has remained remarkably consistent over almost four decades: the vessels pictured in a profile from June 1984 are very recognisable siblings to the ones Odundo is working on today.
Odundo’s eureka moment at the Royal College of Art came with the realisation that she did not need glazes to bring sophistication to her works; instead they become ‘sophisticated in the making: in poise and in movement, in creating static pieces that were sensual and sensuous and that play in the course of human drama’. Exploring that human drama, she looked to many different ceramic traditions, including ancient works from Mesoamerica, the Fertile Crescent and East Asia, as well the Staffordshire slipware of Thomas Toft and Ralph Simpson, vehicles for storytelling and satire in the 17th century.
The firing of clay vessels was a transformational moment in human development, dating back some 20,000 years. For millennia, ceramics have been at the centre of daily and ritual traditions: this is the edge along which Odundo’s work dances, speaking to the comfortable familiarity of pots and jars and to the otherworldly resonance of sacred objects. Tall, straight-sided vessels, blackened in the kiln, relate to funerary forms placed on graves in East Africa: containers for the soul. She imagines that other pieces, ‘if we lived in Egyptian times, would go with their owner to the burial chamber and be very comfortable in that context’. Has anyone been buried with one of her pots? ‘No!’ She laughs. ‘Not so far...’
Magdalene Odundo will be exhibiting at Houghton Hall from 12 May – 29 September 2024. Details: www.houghtonhall.com/dame-magdalene-odundo/
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