Magdalene Odundo
Ceramic artist
She made the vessel a form of lasting artistic expression.
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Magdalene Odundo is a Kenyan-born British ceramic artist known for hand-built vessels whose surfaces and forms reflect a sustained engagement with clay. Her work draws on a wide range of ceramic traditions without simply reproducing them.
Held in major collections, her vessels have helped establish ceramics as a field of ambitious contemporary art. Her story belongs to Kenya's cultural diaspora as well as to the history of British studio pottery.
Life and work
Dame Magdalene Anyango Namakhiya Odundo (born 1950) is a Kenyan-born British studio potter, who now lives in Farnham, Surrey, England. Her work is in the collections of notable museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, The British Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Museum of African Art.
Magdalene Odundo was born in 1950 in Nairobi, Kenya, and received her early education in both India and Kenya. She attended the Kabete National Polytechnic in Kenya to study Graphics and Commercial Art and later moved to England in 1971 to follow her chosen vocation in Graphic Design. After training in Farnham, Surrey, she completed her qualifications in foundation art and graphics at the Cambridge School of Art, where she began to specialise in ceramics.
After a while in England, she discovered pottery, and in 1974–75 she visited Nigeria, visiting the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja, and Kenya to study traditional hand-built pottery techniques. She also travelled to San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, to observe the making of black-burnished vessels. In 1976, Odundo received a BA degree from West Surrey College of Art & Design (now University for the Creative Arts). She then earned a master's degree at the Royal College of Art in London. She taught at the Commonwealth Institute in London from 1976 to 1979 and at the Royal College of Art in London from 1979 to 1982, before returning to teach at Surrey Institute of Art & Design (now University for the Creative Arts) in 1997, becoming Professor of Ceramics in 2001.
In March 2016, she was inaugurated as an Emerita Professor of the University for the Creative Arts, with a celebration event held at the Farnham campus against the backdrop of her important work in glass, Transition II. She lives and works in Surrey.
Odundo's best-known ceramics are hand-built, using a coiling technique. Each piece is burnished, covered with slip, and then burnished again. The pieces are fired in an oxidizing atmosphere, which turns them red-orange. A second firing in an oxygen-poor (reducing) atmosphere causes the clay to turn black; this is known as reduction-firing. She uses the same types of techniques used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans and likes to take inspiration from countries such as China and Mexico. Her graphic design skills still remain with her as she often sketches her interest in natural forms and the design of form to help her with her ceramic creations. Many of the vessels Odundo creates are reminiscent of the human form, often following the curves of the spine, stomach, or hair. Furthermore, the shape of expression of her vessels are symbolic of the female body; one of her most famous pieces is a black and ocher vessel with a curved base and elongated neck resembling the form of a pregnant woman. Her work is now a part of permanent collections of nearly 50 international museums, including:
In 2006, her work was presented in an exhibition titled Resonance and Inspiration at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art of the University of Florida. This was her first solo exhibition in the US since 1997 and her first solo appearance in Florida. This exhibit was also the first time her drawings and sketches were presented alongside her vessels. Her free-form drawing style replicates the same shape and form as her vessels, serving as a glimpse into how Odundo perceives her three-dimensional works in two dimensions.
In 2019, there was a major exhibition that centred on a group of more than 50 of her works, alongside other works of art that Odundo saw as relating to or influencing her work; the exhibition was titled The Journey of Things. The show was displayed in two locations: The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire and then the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, East Anglia.
This section adapts selected passages from Magdalene Odundo by Wikipedia contributors. It is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected passages; pronunciation guides, lists and reference markers omitted; punctuation and paragraph breaks adjusted. Photographs have separate licences.
