Ceramic artist · Kenya
Magdalene Odundo
Magdalene Odundo (born 1950) is a Kenyan-born British ceramic artist, one of the most celebrated potters in the world. She builds her vessels by hand, without a wheel, then burnishes and fires them to a deep orange or a glossy black; their swelling, leaning forms recall bodies, hairstyles and gestures. Trained in Britain and influenced by the women potters of Nigeria and Kenya, she is Chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts and was made a Dame in 2020.
Updated 3 min read
From Nairobi to Farnham
Magdalene Anyango Namakhiya Odundo was born in Nairobi in 1950 and spent part of her childhood in India. She trained first in commercial art in Nairobi, and in 1971 moved to England, where she studied at the Cambridge College of Art, and a teacher there, Zoë Ellison, is credited with turning her towards clay. She studied ceramics at the West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham from 1973 to 1976 and later took a master's degree at the Royal College of Art in London, completed in 1982.
Learning from women potters
A decisive moment came in 1974, when she travelled to the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja, Nigeria, founded by Michael Cardew, where Ladi Kwali had made her name. There she learned the hand-building methods of Gbari women potters, and she later studied pottery traditions in Kenya as well. Those African techniques — coiling, scraping, burnishing with stones, open firing — became the basis of her art, combined with what she saw in ancient ceramics from Egypt, Greece, the Americas and Asia.
The vessels
Odundo does not use a wheel. Each vessel is built slowly by hand, from coils of clay, coated with a fine clay slip and burnished with stones until it shines. The pieces are burnished twice and fired twice; the black ones take their colour from carbon, and the result looks almost like metal or stone. The forms are her own: tall necks that lean to one side, swelling bellies, lugs and spouts that suggest arms, ears or knots of hair. They can be read as bodies, as heads, or simply as pots, and they hold a perfect, quiet balance.
How to look at an Odundo: walk round it, since the neck that leans one way from one side can seem to straighten from another. Look at the surface, which is the proof of the work: the sheen comes from burnishing with stones, not from glaze. Then look at the opening, where the pot stops being a body and becomes a container.
Recognition
Her work is in almost fifty museums; public collections that list it include the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. In 2019 the Hepworth Wakefield (16 February to 2 June) and the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich (3 August to 15 December) presented The Journey of Things, in which she chose the objects herself: about fifty of her own vessels beside almost a hundred other pieces, among them British studio pottery by Hans Coper and Lucie Rie, ancient vessels from Greece and Egypt, Elizabethan costume and textiles, ritual sculpture from across Africa and a large work by El Anatsui. The display was designed by the architect Farshid Moussavi. She also holds an OBE. She taught for many years and became Chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts in 2018, and in 2020 she was made a Dame.
Where to see the work
Museums that list her vessels online include Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales), which bought Asymmetric I (2016, 55 centimetres high) in 2020; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, which holds Asymmetrical Series II (2015); the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, with an untitled vessel of 2009; and the Hepworth Wakefield, which acquired Asymmetric Vessel (2021). Ask each which pieces are on display, since displays change. The Fitzwilliam in Cambridge lists her among its external curators.
See also
African pottery and Ladi Kwali; the Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu and the Zanzibar-born painter Lubaina Himid; East African art; and our list of Kenyan artists.
