Stare at one of Magdalene Odundo’s vessels for long enough and you start to wonder if you might just have seen it breathe, its rounded belly imperceptibly expanding. The ceramic artist has often talked about the “body-ness”, as she puts it, of her pots, but standing close to one is to be struck by how alive they feel. Her current London show at Thomas Dane Gallery, comprising six vessels, is Odundo’s first solo exhibition in the capital for 20 years. It’s a continuation of her show earlier this year at Houghton Hall, the stately home in Norfolk. Odundo has found new recognition in recent years – a significant 2019 Hepworth Wakefield exhibition, and she showed at this year’s Venice Biennale. Her work set a new record price for a living ceramicist when one of her vessels sold for £200,000 in 2020, the same year she was made a dame.
If Odundo’s professional life is at a high, her personal life has been difficult in recent months, after a period of ill health, and recovery from surgery. It has been tough, she says, but adds with a laugh: “I’m still standing – just about.” Her mobility has been affected, and she thinks it will be another few months before she can get back to her clay. How is she coping? “Not very well,” she says with a smile – we’re talking over Zoom, Odundo at home in Farnham, Surrey. Although she says she’s tired, she laughs often.
Odundo’s work is physical, lifting and manipulating the clay. “It is the contact with the material, the dialogue you have while you’re making – it’s very difficult to replace,” she says. “I can indulge in thinking, I can sketch, sit out and enjoy the shapes in the sky and the forms of trees and things like that. But until I transfer that energy into my material, I just feel lost.” Still, she adds, one doctor said that her desperation to get back to work will probably help her recovery. Maybe it will change her work, I say. “You mean start trampling on it and making ‘art’?” She laughs. “That’s going to be interesting. I have tried it before, it didn’t work with me.” Of course not – Odundo’s work is too exquisite for such silliness.
At Houghton Hall, where she was both the first Black artist and the first woman to have an exhibition, her vessels held their own in an English stately home, surrounded by ancestral images of powerful white men. One piece came out of Odundo’s residency at Wedgwood – a towering sculpture featuring imagery of enslaved people, as well as contemporary protests in Kenya, inspired by the link between founder Josiah Wedgwood and anti-slavery campaigner Olaudah Equiano. “I’ve always wanted to do semi-political or a kind of civic, social piece of work,” says Odundo.
At her London show, her vessels look both organic and otherworldly. Never have I wanted to touch an exhibition piece more. Does the feel of the pieces change according to where they are? “I think to a certain extent, the spirit …” She pauses. “I want to say dynamics, or the essence, and the body language – my work is very bodily orientated – changes a bit.” In museums, “you’re coming across other associations and so there’s a comparative nature to settings like that.” In a solo show, “the work has to have meaning, has to transmit, translate and narrate on its own. It’s like a dancer being left on stage to do their solo, and they’re pirouetting.”
Odundo, 74, has been revered for many years – she has influenced many younger artists, including Theaster Gates, and fashion designers such as Loewe’s Jonathan Anderson – but she is now getting more mainstream recognition. How does that feel? “It’s difficult to say, because I’ve always worked very quietly and sort of singly.” She has never shared a studio, she points out. Showing in the mid-1980s gave her the confidence, she says, to focus on the work, and not who might want to buy it. “Of course, I wanted the work to be bought, I wanted great collectors and great museums to have it. But I think if I had concentrated on that, I would be making perhaps what Michael Cardew [the eminent potter, who was one of Odundo’s teachers] used to call things other people want and not what you have trained for. I’ve taken the fact that I’ve been able to live off my work for all these years as an endorsement of my convictions, and a testament of staying true to who you are.”
Odundo was born in Kenya, but spent part of her childhood in Delhi, where her father was a journalist. Later, back in Kenya, still then under British rule, “the schools were very oriented to apartheid and for most Africans, there wasn’t an opportunity to be in well-endowed schools. We were taught needlework because it was thought that we’d end up being housemaids. So it was a very unequal education.”
By the time Odundo was 10, her mother, father, andyounger sister, one of several siblings, had all died. “So it was a devastating time.” Looking back, she says, it almost feels more devastating now. “As kids, we just had to survive. I think the most difficult bit was that we were separated because we couldn’t be kept together.” Odundo was sent to live with relatives in Mombasa. At secondary school, taught by nuns, one teacher realised Odundo had a talent for drawing, “so she made me sit in the biology room on weekends to draw charts for her.” The nun would sometimes take her to galleries in Nairobi. “I think it was to keep me out of trouble,” she says with a laugh. “I was near being expelled several times. She must have understood me.”
In Kenya, Odundo’s art career started in design for advertising, which she didn’t love: “You had to sell soap to poor people who couldn’t afford soap.” Moving to the UK in 1971, for a foundation course at the Cambridge School of Art, Odundo discovered ceramics and found herself so engaged that she would lose all sense of time. “They used to have to chuck me out of the studio.” She went on to study at what is now the University for the Creative Arts (later she would be a professor there for many years), studied traditional techniques in Nigeria and Kenya, and did a master’s at the Royal College of Art.
As a child, in her colonial education, she had been taught that art originating from her continent was “primitive”. Things hadn’t changed that much in the 1980s and 90s. Did she get the impression that people in the art world were trying to marginalise her work? “They tried, but I think it’s been impossible for them,” she says. Much of her inspiration has come from her wide-ranging travels and influences, her childhood not just in Kenya but in India too. “My parents, even though [time with them] was short, they instilled in us an expansiveness in our thinking and a spirituality that lends itself to a perception that we are part and parcel of humanity.”
She has often talked about the importance of the interiors of her pots, and how it is just as vital to her as the burnished lustre of their exteriors. “Who we are is defined by what is inside. It’s that spirit that is of interest to me.” She enjoys the fact that her art connects her to millennia of humans who have made clay vessels, and beautiful ones too. “A cooking pot is there not just to contain nourishment. People have always made beautiful pots to enhance that humanity. People want to eat and cook from beautiful vessels, because all these activities – cooking, prayer, meditation – are associated with the inner part of ourselves.”
Odundo says she has a general idea of what a vessel will look like, once finished, because she will have sketched it, but foremost in mind is an idea of what “movement” she is aiming for, an inspiration regularly taken from life. “It might be somebody I saw in the supermarket holding a basket in a certain way. Or a kid riding their scooter, a leg flying this or that way, and it’s that space that they create that I might want to shape.” Then it’s a relationship with the clay, “and what I’m feeling at that particular time” that shapes the piece. She likens it to poetry, “where you can work it and rework it.” But ultimately, she says, “it’s that search of simplicity of form that dictates what I make.”
Does she know when it’s finished? “No,” she says. “I’ve always had to compromise, and maybe that’s what allows me to continue making – because I know I haven’t finished that last piece.”
• Magdalene Odundo is at Thomas Dane Gallery, London SW1, until 14 December
