Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. You think you know everything about contemporary art with your far-fetched analyses, but you look at a ceramic and see nothing but a vase. How sad! It’s like gazing at the sea and seeing nothing but water. Today, I will talk to you about Dame Magdalene Odundo, this Kenyan-born British artist who, for more than four decades, has been transforming clay into silent poetry and silencing the loudest among us.
If you don’t know Odundo yet, then you must be living in a cave, which is ironic since it was precisely in caves that humans began shaping clay about 20,000 years ago. Odundo is the most influential ceramicist of our time, whose works fetch stratospheric prices at auctions, over 500,000 euros for a single vase in 2023. Her pieces, these black or orange bodies with sensual curves, speak to us in a universal language that transcends borders and eras.
Born in Nairobi in 1950, Odundo grew up between Kenya and India, initially trained in graphic design before settling in the United Kingdom in 1971. It was at Cambridge that she discovered her passion for ceramics, under the influence of Zoë Ellison, the Zimbabwean potter who first put clay in her hands. “The first time I touched clay, I literally fell in love,” she confides [1]. She, who had planned to become a graphic designer, found herself embracing this primordial material, the one that connects us all to the earth. She then continued her training at the West Surrey College of Art and Design (now the University for Creative Arts) and at the Royal College of Art in London.
But it was during her travels to Nigeria, Kenya, among the Pueblos of New Mexico, China, and elsewhere that Odundo truly forged her artistic identity. She absorbed techniques and influences, not to blindly copy them but to digest and transcend them. She observed the Gwari potters in Nigeria, including the legendary Ladi Kwali, and learned hand-building techniques. Like an anthropologist of clay, she studied ceramic traditions worldwide to invent her own language.
What makes Odundo’s uniqueness is that she has managed to create an immediately recognizable style while drawing from the universal history of ceramics. Her vases are not vases. They are bodies, presences, characters. She shapes her pieces by hand using the coiling technique, stretching and pinching the red clay until she obtains these organic forms that sometimes evoke a pregnant woman’s belly, sometimes a slender neck, or even a traditional African hairstyle. After shaping comes the meticulous polishing with pebbles, then the firing. A first firing in an oxidizing atmosphere gives this characteristic orangey hue; a second in a reducing atmosphere produces these deep blacks that seem to absorb the light.
Observe the piece “Untitled” from 1995, with its rounded belly and its long neck that rises as if in a graceful stretch. Isn’t it a dancing body? A woman in motion? Or perhaps a bird about to take flight? This ambiguity is precisely what makes her work powerful. Odundo lets us freely interpret, projecting our own fantasies and associations onto these forms that are both familiar and strange.
Let us now take the bodily dimension of her work, which plunges us directly into the realm of dance. Because yes, Odundo’s ceramics dance. They whirl, twist, stretch through space like dancers in the middle of a choreography. It is no accident that she often talks about “dancing” with her pieces during their creation. She stands on a small step stool next to the lump of clay, working from top to bottom, turning around it, in a true bodily performance. The creative process itself becomes a dance.
Dance, this art of the moving body, finds a perfect echo in these vases that seem frozen mid-movement. As choreographer Merce Cunningham brilliantly expressed, “dance is an art in time and space; the object of dance is to create significant temporal and spatial relationships” [2]. Odundo’s pieces precisely create these significant relationships in space, while suggesting time through the suspended movement.
Her works remind us of traditional African dances, where the body becomes a vehicle of communication with invisible forces. But they also evoke the clean lines of contemporary dance, the elegant twists of modern ballet. The piece “Untitled” from 2021, with its cinched waist and asymmetrical opening, is it not like a dancer leaning in a perfect arabesque? Art historian Augustus Casely-Hayford rightly noted that Odundo creates “a trans-temporal and trans-global visual system that is her own; modern, yet simultaneously ancient, African but resolutely European” [3].
This tension between tradition and modernity, between East and West, between static and dynamic, is the full richness of her work. She does not content herself with making pretty pots to decorate your IKEA living room (although they would make your interior much more interesting). She explores fundamental questions of identity, migration, belonging. Born in Kenya, trained in Great Britain, traveling around the world, Odundo embodies this cultural hybridity that defines our era.
But there is more. If dance allows us to understand the bodily and rhythmic dimension of her work, it is to architecture that we must turn to grasp its spatial structure. For Odundo’s vases are above all spaces, volumes that dialogue with the void that surrounds them and that they contain.
As architect Louis Kahn stated, “architecture is the thoughtful creation of spaces” [4]. Odundo’s ceramics perfectly embody this definition. Each piece is a carefully orchestrated space, where the inside and outside resonate. She often speaks of her vases as having “a skin and a body, an inside and an outside.” This conception of the object as a habitable space, as miniature architecture, is fundamental.
Take Odundo’s “Symmetrical Series,” those vases with perfectly balanced shapes whose narrow opening contrasts with the fullness of the body. Isn’t there something there that recalls the perfect proportions of a Greek temple? Or the formal purity of a modernist cathedral like Ronchamp by Le Corbusier? Odundo understands, like great architects, that form must serve the space it defines.
This architectural dimension also expresses itself in her way of thinking about volumes. Her pieces are never simply placed on their pedestal; they seem to rise, defy gravity, create their own relationship to space. As she explains herself: “The human body is a vessel that contains us, that contains our human being. As artists and creators of objects, when we sculpt, model, or form figures or containers, we echo the vessel that we are as human containers of spirit and body” [3].
This vision of the body as architecture, and architecture as body, runs throughout her work. It reminds us that we inhabit our body as we inhabit a space, and that every space bears the imprint of the body that designed it. Odundo’s vases are bodily architectures, living spaces that breathe and dialogue with their environment.
There is an economy of means in Odundo’s work that commands admiration. Like the greatest architects, she knows that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Her pieces contain no superfluous elements, no gratuitous decoration. Every curve, every bulge, every texture is necessary for the balance of the whole. This formal rigor echoes the famous phrase by architect Mies van der Rohe: “Less is more.”
Yet, within this apparent simplicity hides infinite complexity. For each of Odundo’s pieces contains multitudes: the history of ceramics since time immemorial, shaping traditions from several continents, the artist’s personal reflections on identity and belonging. Like a building that is simultaneously functional and symbolic, utilitarian and sacred, her vases operate on several levels of interpretation.
During the recent exhibition “Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects” at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto (October 2023, April 2024), the artist juxtaposed her works with historical objects from different cultures and periods. This visual dialogue revealed deep connections between her work and the universal history of object creation. An ancient Greek vase stood alongside a contemporary ceramic, an African mask conversed with a modernist sculpture. In this vast panorama, Odundo’s works appeared as perfect syntheses, bridges thrown between epochs and cultures.
This exhibition, like the one held at Houghton Hall until September 2024, or the one at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London, testifies to Odundo’s now indisputable status in the art world. She is no longer merely a ceramist, but a major artist whose work transcends the traditional categories of art and craft.
The market has understood this well, by the way. The prices of her works have exploded in recent years. The dizzying figures of her sales attest to the late but definitive recognition of her genius. Because it is indeed genius we are talking about. In a world saturated with images and noise, Odundo offers us the luxury of silence and contemplation. Her pieces do not shout; they whisper. They do not impose themselves; they invite. As the critic Emmanuel Cooper so aptly wrote, “some of these pieces are almost hilarious in their audacity, their shamelessness, their cheekiness. Sometimes, they also strut around in a sort of wonderfully seductive self-satisfaction. They look like they could burst out laughing at any moment” [4].
This personification is not accidental. Odundo’s vases are alive. They breathe, they dance, they look at us. They challenge us in our deepest humanity, reminding us that we too are temporary vessels, containers of the soul. They bring us back to the essential: the earth from which we come and to which we will return.
In our era obsessed with the digital and the virtual, Odundo’s work reminds us of the priceless value of the tactile, the material, the embodied. Her vases are resolutely analog. They exist in real space, they have weight, texture, presence. They are the fruit of a direct dialogue between the artist’s hand and the material. As she herself says: “You come from the earth, and you return to it” [3].
This awareness of our finitude, our earthly rootedness, gives her work a profoundly humanist dimension. Odundo celebrates the beauty of the human body in all its diversity, sensuality, fragility. Her vases are like hymns to the flesh, to skin, to the curves and folds that make up our shared humanity.
There is something truly alchemical in her way of transforming clay, that raw and formless material, into objects of striking beauty. The clay literally becomes gold under her fingers, if we consider the market value of her pieces, but especially metaphorically, in this transmutation of matter into spirit.
Because spirituality is indeed also what Odundo’s work is about. Not a dogmatic or religious spirituality, but that deep connection to something beyond us, to what connects us all. Her vases are like contemporary ritual objects, points of contact between the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial.
The artist herself acknowledges this dimension: “The vessel is present from birth to death. We are brought into the world through a vessel and we leave it in a vessel. I think that’s why the idea of incarnation, and of representing an individual, was so poignant when one thinks about and appreciates the pot as a universal object” [3].
This universality may be the key to understanding the power of Odundo’s work. In a fragmented and divided world, she reminds us of our common humanity, our belonging to the great family of object makers, from the first potters of prehistory to today. She situates us in a temporal continuity that transcends borders and particular identities.
Isn’t that the ultimate mission of art? To make us feel, beyond superficial differences, what deeply unites us? Odundo’s vases, in their silent elegance, achieve this better than many speeches. They are both deeply rooted in specific traditions and resolutely universal, as if the artist had succeeded in squaring the circle.
So yes, you bunch of snobs, you can keep marveling at the latest trendy conceptual artist who displays his dirty underwear in a hip gallery. Meanwhile, Magdalene Odundo, in her Surrey studio, will continue to shape clay with the patience and wisdom of an artist who has understood the essential: true art does not seek to impress, but to touch. It does not want to be intellectually understood, but viscerally felt.
Her vases speak to us without words, touch us without contact, move us without artifice. In their apparent simplicity hides an infinite complexity, like those Zen kōans that defy logic to reach intuition directly. They invite us to slow down, to observe, to feel. To be fully present. In this world of noise and fury, isn’t that the most beautiful gift?
- Stephanie Connell, “Artist Spotlight: The work of Dame Magdalene Odundo”, Doerr Valuations, 2024.
- Merce Cunningham, “Space, Time and Dance”, Transformation, 1952, vol. 1, no. 3.
- Beth Williamson, “Magdalene Odundo review-Thomas Dane Gallery”, Studio International, 2024.
- Emmanuel Cooper, “Magdalene Odundo: A Survey Exhibition”, Crafts Council, London, 1992.
