Magdalene Odundo said no when she was first approached to organize an exhibition at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the Palladian mansion built in the 1720s for Britain’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole. And then: “No, not yet.”
The ceramist’s large sculptural vessels are all about context, drawing inspiration from Africa, ancient Greece, French Impressionism, modernist ceramics and abstract sculpture. To exhibit there he wanted time “to study what Houghton Hall it was about. “I didn’t want to just leave my work on the site without a relationship with the building, without knowing the family and the history.”
Odundo was born in Nairobi in 1950, shortly before the Mau Mau uprising against the British authorities. “There is a lot of history connecting my Kenyan heritage and British history,” says Odundo, who moved to the UK in 1971 and graduated from the RCA in 1982. His exhibition opens in May, five years after his first visit to home. Meanwhile, she received the title of dame, she exhibited as part of the Venice Biennale, she had a career that she defined show at the Hepworth Wakefield, broke the world auction record for a contemporary ceramic artist and received a lifetime achievement award from the London Design Festival. At Houghton, she is the first woman and the first black artist to present an exhibition (James Turrell, Richard Long, Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor are some of the contemporary names who preceded her).
The exhibition is not at all what you would expect. The way his sculptures interact with the Houghton State Rooms “reminds us that we are no different from each other, but we still make differences. And that creates chaos,” says Odundo.
In what promises to be one of the most striking displays, a single vessel will stand proud in the center of Houghton’s vast Red-Gold Hall, from which multiple portraits hang. Odundo vessels have often been described as anthropomorphic, and this one “is like a sentinel man, standing there, watching these other figures,” he says. His intention is for visitors to “pay attention to the portraits there, but also look at my work not only as a piece of ceramic but as something that has a bodily essence.”
Juxtapositions, Odundo says, emphasize “the universality of how we think.” He is having tea at his Surrey home, part of a group of houses on the edge of a medieval deer park whose free-ranging inhabitants, he says, frequently jump the fence and chew its plants. He is a small, quiet force with a lushly colored scarf that radiates warmth.
His studio is located in a purpose-built extension with its own ovens. Stool-sized shapes wrapped in black trash bags and tied with duct tape are planters in progress; Instead of using a wheel, Odundo builds it by hand. clay vessels using a hybrid of techniques, including a traditional Gbari practice learned in Abuja. Then he polishes them by hand, adds a fine clay slip and burnishes them again. The final firing results in black and orange vessels so polished that they offer an almost reflective shine.
If each vessel with its elegant curvature and profile-like protuberances can be seen as a portrait of a person, Odundo suggests that it is rather a portrait of their soul, “what we do not see, what is not tangible.” She explains: “The pieces visually lead you to try to discover what is inside. It is about the human form. We have this internal side that makes us who we are, and the external part that is the adornment of who we are. And humanity emerges from what is hidden inside you.”
As “statements of being,” it is important that these vessels be “embraced,” Odundo says, “as a person. Loved. As if you loved a human being. To this end, while the pieces he exhibits at Houghton challenge his surroundings, they also demand resolution.
“When you stand in front of one of her pieces, you are immediately struck by the shape…she creates these extraordinary shapes,” says Abraham Thomas, the Metropolitan Museum of Artcurator of modern architecture, design and decorative arts. Add andres bonacinawho curated the Odundo exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield and now represents her: “Magdalena’s sculptural language addresses a diverse audience and a wide range of contemporary concerns.”
Odundo is caught off guard when asked what it feels like to receive a DBE. “Oh, that’s a tough question. It is an honor and a privilege. Despite all the fuss surrounding honors due to Commonwealth and political history, it is still a tradition I grew up with,” he says. “Being a Lady of the British Empire is complex, but I recognize that within that complex structure my work has been recognized.”
Commercially, this is also the case. In 2022, the leading contemporary art gallery Thomas Dane showed his work as part of a group exhibition; Will exhibit Houghton pieces in October. “In the past, I think the work of many artists would have been categorized and distinguished as early African art,” Odundo says of the broad shift in the market. “It would never have been shown in a gallery of white cubes. But now, especially since Black Lives Matter, galleries are clamoring to exhibit work that all of us for years have thought should have had visibility.”
Odundo reserves his most ambitious intervention in Houghton for the Marble Parlor, a banquet hall with imposing full-length portraits. It would have been the place for “masterpiece” items, so Odundo is displaying a multi-tiered, wedding cake-like sculpture, 160cm high, made in a reed expression (golden yellow) from the distinctive Jasperware by Wedgwood. Founder Josiah Wedgwood was a prominent abolitionist, and Odundo uses this story to build a narrative around slavery and exploitation, from a bottom layer featuring men and women in chains, to a top layer of contemporary protest images in Kenya. against higher taxes and reduced subsidies. A sign reads “Poverty is man-made.”
The Marquis of Cholmondeley, current custodian of Houghton, says he is “especially eager” to see this sculpture. “I think there will be a fascinating dialogue with Houghton’s opulent decoration, the antithesis of Magdalena’s work, and some of her recent work alludes to political and social issues of the early 18th century.”
Odundo puts it more directly. “We haven’t really learned anything from history,” he says. “We haven’t really resolved any humanity and all we do is fight.” She says that she feels desperate about the global situation. “Paradise exists but it is lost.” However, when pressed, she says there is optimism in her work. “I think the beauty in Jasperware is hope, and the use of gold cane in the work is perhaps a search for that alchemy of peace… this beautiful aspect of a kind of cake, a totem that rises upward, is the hope”.
Magdalena Odundo, Houghton HallMay 12 to September 29. Thomas Dane Gallery will present works by Odundo de Houghton from October 8 to December 14, coinciding with London frieze21st edition