The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Dame Magdalene Odundo, arguably one of the most esteemed living ceramic artists, arrived in Toronto to much fanfare and stratospheric buzz. Her Canadian debut, “Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects,” was on view at the Gardiner
Museum in Toronto, Canada, October 19, 2023, to April 21, 2024. This was the largest collection of her works ever shown in North America. At 74, Odundo shows no signs of slowing down. The Kenyan-born British artist skyrocketed onto the international
scene when work from her graduate exhibition at the Royal College of Art was collected by the British Museum in the mid-1980s.
Awe Inspiring Reactions
I gasped audibly the first time I entered the exhibition space on the third floor of the Gardiner Museum. A nearby staff member heard me and remarked, “That’s exactly the reaction we are looking for.” Odundo’s 21 vessels
sit on two dark-hewn “runways” in the center of the 3000 square foot gallery—all of them level at about hip height. It felt like being in the vaults of a regal sanctuary with precious treasure. I had only ever experienced
two of Odundo’s works in person: the first time was at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where I instantly became a devotee; the second time was in the spring of 2023, at the Des Moines Art Center, where I had the great privilege of being
invited to show alongside her in a group show inspired by Theaster Gates.1 After several minutes, I became aware of the over 50 seemingly disparate artworks that lined the wall space of three of the gallery’s perimeters.
These carefully selected works all “spoke” to Odundo’s work, and she herself co-curated the prints, paintings, and sculptures with Chief Curator Sequoia Miller, who championed this project.
I visited the exhibition seven times over its four-month run. I attended the opening public chat between artist and curator and participated in the Q&A. I returned the next day for the artist’s walk-through of the exhibition,
where she spent over an hour telling an intimate group of about twenty people about her process, about what moves her, how she feels about her art, the rate at which she works, and why she works. Odundo says herself, “I am
selfish that way.” She pulls the clay up by hand, working with a turn table as her base. Once Odundo is satisfied with the form, she burnishes each piece to a smooth surface until she achieves a peerless shine. The works are coated
with terra sigillata, a film mist of the tiny molecules of clay, like the muddy water that sits on the silt of a clay riverbed, then fired. Odundo saggar fires each piece with atmospheric materials burning in close range to the piece
so that the red earthenware is either wholly or partially “blackened.”
A Developing Presence
During her studies in the UK, Odundo spent three months in West Africa, where she met and studied with renowned British potter, Michael Cardew. It was there that she was heavily influenced by the local Abuji pottery while at the same time
she “fell in love with English slipware.” Her early intentions were to return to her native land of Kenya to work. Indeed, she chose earthenware as her medium for economy, as she assumed it would be easier to produce in
Kenya than working with mid-fire stoneware.
Odundo does not stress or comment upon any social or political undertones in her work. She has largely been absent in the ongoing discourse around race and disenfranchisement. During the Q&A at the Gardiner Museum in mid-October, I
asked her directly about her experience of race as a Black woman in a predominantly white male industry. Odundo’s response was oblique. She readily affirmed that she channels the collective sufferings of the violent colonial
insurgency in Kenya into the work. Odundo has made peace with the fact that, by virtue of who she is, her success, and her very presence on a global stage, her work is a part of critical engagement and counter-politics as an artist
working within the African diaspora.
A Hidden Conversation
Miller and Odundo chose to include two Black-identifying artists: the late Denyse Thomasos and Montreal-based Eddy Firmin. Both of these artists have Caribbean roots, and, like myself, both are mixed-race and have South Asian ancestry.
I discovered Thomasos and her work the year after she died, and I studied her work during my MFA at Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCADU) in Toronto. Thomasos was close to my age. Like me, she went to Sheridan
College and the University of Toronto. She was the first living female Black artist to have been acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada’s largest art gallery. Thomasos’ Untitled 2 is diminutive
as compared to the rest of her mature work. She works with abstract symbolism around the transatlantic slave trade and the commodification of racialized workers globally in bold, colorful strokes. In a similar vein, Firmin deeply embeds the
political and racialized aspects of his work through abstract symbolism. The ceramic mask on display is a self-portrait. Half the wall-mounted, life-sized figure is unglazed black clay, the other half is glazed white and “branded”
with multiple Chanel perfume logos: saucy, contemporary, political, hard-hitting.3
Montreal-based artist Jean-Pierre Larocque’s sentinel-like abstract horse and rider4 stands just outside the gallery. I could not overlook the hidden conversation between Larocque’s gestural figurative charcoal drawing
that is part of the exhibition and his volumetric 3D work outside the gallery. His 2D work is mounted alongside Odundo’s black-on-white figurative silkscreen prints on paper in the gallery.5 They are in conversation
with each other. Larocque’s 2D and 3D works, like Odundo, mirror each other in the ideation and creation processes. Odundo keeps a sketchbook of ideas and forms, where drawing becomes a “diary-like dictionary.” In
Odundo’s studio, the works make themselves extemporaneously, in a similar way as a jazz tune might find variation in its performance. Two of these are included in dialog with the works displayed.6 To my eye, the sketches
come to life in two untitled works, both created in 2022. Both recall an hourglass with its upper quarter truncated, left for the viewer’s mind to imagine. Both play with the uncertainty of atmospheric firing, so that organic
shapes of the orange-hued earthenware seem to blush forth from the darkness.
During my visits, I kept returning to one case in particular. In the end, making a beeline to a ceramic vessel painted by Marc Chagall. Where Odundo suggests the figurative female form, Chagall clearly paints the woman on his curvaceous
vase. Its shape resonates strongly with Odundo’s rounder gourd-like forms. The piece has a “hidden” extra figure, a man, a lover, cleverly “wrapped” around the woman’s waist. I find Les Fiancés (Betrothed)7 by the French surrealist mesmerizing—the way it captures the spirit and soul of the woman and her lover with so few bold brushstrokes. The Chagall is flanked by two ivory figures, hundreds, if not thousands, of
years older—an Inuit miniature8 and a surprisingly similarly constructed work from Greece—monochrome, simple expression of the human form.9 It is as if Odundo draws her sensibility to the human form
from the endless hours she would have spent as a student gazing at the objects in the British Museum.
Merged Techniques, Stories, and Personalities
Odundo chooses to anonymize the pieces: they are untitled, nonetheless, she spoke about each piece’s personality. In potters’ language, an allegory of the human form seems to have been present from the earliest times: the neck
of a vase or bottle, its shoulders, the face or belly of a pot. Odundo talks about her work as representing women with attitude—with hands on their hips, a corset on their waist, posturing, daring, cheeky, gossiping. She
talked about the “crowning” aspect in the works where the emphasis on the opening of the neck signals the head, “The head that is not there but implied and makes each of us who we are.”
The vessels are displayed out of chronology. The earliest is an untitled piece dating back to 1984. Center stage, it stands out for its simplicity, its relatively diminutive size, and its somewhat pewter-like sheen. This early work showcases
the most metallic sheen of the collection. During the artist walk-through, Odundo pointed to a direct line of dialog that speaks to form between this work and the three Kenyan vessels from the 1960s displayed at the back of the
room by unknown potters.
In sharp contrast to Untitled (1984)’s unadorned form, Untitled (1990) sports daring embellishment. This work is fully blackened, with two hollow circles, “lugs,” reflecting each other in perfect symmetry.
These are set below two sets of three “spikes” that reach out adjacent to each other. They seem hostile in their untouchability. Odundo spoke about traditional African vessels and their “capacity to hold the spirits
of today and the afterlife.” The looped lugs and nodules draw on universal references from Zulu, Nigerian, and other African motifs, as well as New Mexican and other Asian influences. For Odundo, they are more than decorative, they
are narrative, “they animate the work and make them human.” Odundo feels that she hasn’t created anything new, she is merging techniques, stories, and the poetics of the world. Her works are active storytelling, however
she wants her audience to create their own stories. Perhaps this is why the works remain untitled.
Evoking the Senses
During my visits, I became aware of the array of senses that were evoked upon different viewings. After the initial visual overload and awe, the negative space that Odundo’s work commands struck me as a defining quality. The forms
are strong and bold; the space that they do not occupy cuts through the stillness of their presence. Odundo treats the inside and outside with the same degree of care and considers the space that they occupy as important as the void
around them.10 In theory, all of her vessels could be used functionally. They are vessels. Yet, Odundo eschews the age-old dichotomy between form and function in the ceramic canon, for this dichotomy it is irrelevant. Time
is also present: its compression amplified with her work spanning four decades. Odundo works on several pieces at a time, with no assistance, and averages the completion of only ten works every two years.
Light, another visual sense that is evoked, dances, moves, and glistens with varying levels of sheen as the viewer moves around each piece. A nod to the installation crew: all aspects of exhibition design were executed expertly. Unexpectedly,
there is sound—the urgency to sing into the open mouths of the vessels to hear how each might resonate in its own sphere, echo, or project. This feeling is reinforced by the gramophone-like shape of many of the wide-mouthed
pieces.11 Additionally, there is an innate call that beckons the viewer to reach out and thump the gourd-like forms, to manifest rhythm, to hear the pieces. A counterpoint to myobservations, Odundo spoke of the silences in her
work, “where all my spirits are hidden.”
Dame Magdalene Odundo’s solo exhibition, Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects, was on view at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Canada, October 19, 2023, to April 21, 2024.
the author Heidi McKenzie is an artist, author, and curator living in Toronto, Canada. Learn more at www.heidimckenzie.ca.
1 Heidi McKenzie’s work, Division, was featured alongside Magdalene Odundo’s work in “Underneath Everything: Humility and Grandeur in Contemporary Ceramics,” Des Moines Art Centre, Iowa. 2 Untitled, 2012, Denyse Thomasos
(Canadian, born Trinidad, 1964-2012), acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of Dr. Kenneth Montague, the Wedge Collection, Toronto. 3 Emotional alphabet Research/Hunting, 2016, Eddy Firmin (Canadian, born Guadeloupe, b. 1971), ceramic, Gardiner
Museum, G20.12.2. 4 Horse with Baggage #1, 2005-2006, Jean-Pierre Larocque (Canadian, born 1953), Stoneware with glaze, 101.6 Å~ 81.3 Å~ 55.9 cm (40 Å~ 32 Å~ 22 in.), The Diana Reitberger Collection, Gift in Honour
of Edmund and Renate Reitberger. G14.11.5. 5 Scrum, Seared Figure iii, Twist, Figurative Print, 2011. Magdalene Odundo, (Bristish, born Kenya, b. 1950), silk screen print on paper. Courtesy of the artist. 6 Vessel Sketch 1, 2009,
Magdalene Odundo, pencil on paper. Courtesy of the artist; Vessel Sketch II, Magdalene Odundo, ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist. 7 Les Fiancés (Betrothed), 1957, Marc Chagall (Belorussian, 1887-1985), earthenware with glazes,
Gardiner Museum. Gift of Bram and Bluma Appel. G05.19.1. 8 Female Figure Pendant, 1200-1600 CE, Unknown artist, Thule culture, Bellot Strait, Boothia Peninsula, Nunavut, ivory. Royal Ontario Museum. 949.120.20. 9 Female Votive
Figure, c. 2300-2200 BCE, Unknown artist, Cyclades, Greece. Parian marble, Royal Ontario Museum. 929.22.5. 10 All references to Odundo’s views or direct quotes are from notes taken from Odundo’s in-person comments as
documented by the author on one of three occasions at the Gardiner Museum, October, 2023. 11 Examples of Untitled wide-mouthed vessels.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Dame Magdalene Odundo, arguably one of the most esteemed living ceramic artists, arrived in Toronto to much fanfare and stratospheric buzz. Her Canadian debut, “Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects,” was on view at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Canada, October 19, 2023, to April 21, 2024. This was the largest collection of her works ever shown in North America. At 74, Odundo shows no signs of slowing down. The Kenyan-born British artist skyrocketed onto the international scene when work from her graduate exhibition at the Royal College of Art was collected by the British Museum in the mid-1980s.
Awe Inspiring Reactions
I gasped audibly the first time I entered the exhibition space on the third floor of the Gardiner Museum. A nearby staff member heard me and remarked, “That’s exactly the reaction we are looking for.” Odundo’s 21 vessels sit on two dark-hewn “runways” in the center of the 3000 square foot gallery—all of them level at about hip height. It felt like being in the vaults of a regal sanctuary with precious treasure. I had only ever experienced two of Odundo’s works in person: the first time was at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where I instantly became a devotee; the second time was in the spring of 2023, at the Des Moines Art Center, where I had the great privilege of being invited to show alongside her in a group show inspired by Theaster Gates.1 After several minutes, I became aware of the over 50 seemingly disparate artworks that lined the wall space of three of the gallery’s perimeters. These carefully selected works all “spoke” to Odundo’s work, and she herself co-curated the prints, paintings, and sculptures with Chief Curator Sequoia Miller, who championed this project.
I visited the exhibition seven times over its four-month run. I attended the opening public chat between artist and curator and participated in the Q&A. I returned the next day for the artist’s walk-through of the exhibition, where she spent over an hour telling an intimate group of about twenty people about her process, about what moves her, how she feels about her art, the rate at which she works, and why she works. Odundo says herself, “I am selfish that way.” She pulls the clay up by hand, working with a turn table as her base. Once Odundo is satisfied with the form, she burnishes each piece to a smooth surface until she achieves a peerless shine. The works are coated with terra sigillata, a film mist of the tiny molecules of clay, like the muddy water that sits on the silt of a clay riverbed, then fired. Odundo saggar fires each piece with atmospheric materials burning in close range to the piece so that the red earthenware is either wholly or partially “blackened.”
A Developing Presence
During her studies in the UK, Odundo spent three months in West Africa, where she met and studied with renowned British potter, Michael Cardew. It was there that she was heavily influenced by the local Abuji pottery while at the same time she “fell in love with English slipware.” Her early intentions were to return to her native land of Kenya to work. Indeed, she chose earthenware as her medium for economy, as she assumed it would be easier to produce in Kenya than working with mid-fire stoneware.
Odundo does not stress or comment upon any social or political undertones in her work. She has largely been absent in the ongoing discourse around race and disenfranchisement. During the Q&A at the Gardiner Museum in mid-October, I asked her directly about her experience of race as a Black woman in a predominantly white male industry. Odundo’s response was oblique. She readily affirmed that she channels the collective sufferings of the violent colonial insurgency in Kenya into the work. Odundo has made peace with the fact that, by virtue of who she is, her success, and her very presence on a global stage, her work is a part of critical engagement and counter-politics as an artist working within the African diaspora.
A Hidden Conversation
Miller and Odundo chose to include two Black-identifying artists: the late Denyse Thomasos and Montreal-based Eddy Firmin. Both of these artists have Caribbean roots, and, like myself, both are mixed-race and have South Asian ancestry. I discovered Thomasos and her work the year after she died, and I studied her work during my MFA at Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCADU) in Toronto. Thomasos was close to my age. Like me, she went to Sheridan College and the University of Toronto. She was the first living female Black artist to have been acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada’s largest art gallery. Thomasos’ Untitled 2 is diminutive as compared to the rest of her mature work. She works with abstract symbolism around the transatlantic slave trade and the commodification of racialized workers globally in bold, colorful strokes. In a similar vein, Firmin deeply embeds the political and racialized aspects of his work through abstract symbolism. The ceramic mask on display is a self-portrait. Half the wall-mounted, life-sized figure is unglazed black clay, the other half is glazed white and “branded” with multiple Chanel perfume logos: saucy, contemporary, political, hard-hitting.3
Montreal-based artist Jean-Pierre Larocque’s sentinel-like abstract horse and rider4 stands just outside the gallery. I could not overlook the hidden conversation between Larocque’s gestural figurative charcoal drawing that is part of the exhibition and his volumetric 3D work outside the gallery. His 2D work is mounted alongside Odundo’s black-on-white figurative silkscreen prints on paper in the gallery.5 They are in conversation with each other. Larocque’s 2D and 3D works, like Odundo, mirror each other in the ideation and creation processes. Odundo keeps a sketchbook of ideas and forms, where drawing becomes a “diary-like dictionary.” In Odundo’s studio, the works make themselves extemporaneously, in a similar way as a jazz tune might find variation in its performance. Two of these are included in dialog with the works displayed.6 To my eye, the sketches come to life in two untitled works, both created in 2022. Both recall an hourglass with its upper quarter truncated, left for the viewer’s mind to imagine. Both play with the uncertainty of atmospheric firing, so that organic shapes of the orange-hued earthenware seem to blush forth from the darkness.
During my visits, I kept returning to one case in particular. In the end, making a beeline to a ceramic vessel painted by Marc Chagall. Where Odundo suggests the figurative female form, Chagall clearly paints the woman on his curvaceous vase. Its shape resonates strongly with Odundo’s rounder gourd-like forms. The piece has a “hidden” extra figure, a man, a lover, cleverly “wrapped” around the woman’s waist. I find Les Fiancés (Betrothed) 7 by the French surrealist mesmerizing—the way it captures the spirit and soul of the woman and her lover with so few bold brushstrokes. The Chagall is flanked by two ivory figures, hundreds, if not thousands, of years older—an Inuit miniature8 and a surprisingly similarly constructed work from Greece—monochrome, simple expression of the human form.9 It is as if Odundo draws her sensibility to the human form from the endless hours she would have spent as a student gazing at the objects in the British Museum.
Merged Techniques, Stories, and Personalities
Odundo chooses to anonymize the pieces: they are untitled, nonetheless, she spoke about each piece’s personality. In potters’ language, an allegory of the human form seems to have been present from the earliest times: the neck of a vase or bottle, its shoulders, the face or belly of a pot. Odundo talks about her work as representing women with attitude—with hands on their hips, a corset on their waist, posturing, daring, cheeky, gossiping. She talked about the “crowning” aspect in the works where the emphasis on the opening of the neck signals the head, “The head that is not there but implied and makes each of us who we are.”
The vessels are displayed out of chronology. The earliest is an untitled piece dating back to 1984. Center stage, it stands out for its simplicity, its relatively diminutive size, and its somewhat pewter-like sheen. This early work showcases the most metallic sheen of the collection. During the artist walk-through, Odundo pointed to a direct line of dialog that speaks to form between this work and the three Kenyan vessels from the 1960s displayed at the back of the room by unknown potters.
In sharp contrast to Untitled (1984)’s unadorned form, Untitled (1990) sports daring embellishment. This work is fully blackened, with two hollow circles, “lugs,” reflecting each other in perfect symmetry. These are set below two sets of three “spikes” that reach out adjacent to each other. They seem hostile in their untouchability. Odundo spoke about traditional African vessels and their “capacity to hold the spirits of today and the afterlife.” The looped lugs and nodules draw on universal references from Zulu, Nigerian, and other African motifs, as well as New Mexican and other Asian influences. For Odundo, they are more than decorative, they are narrative, “they animate the work and make them human.” Odundo feels that she hasn’t created anything new, she is merging techniques, stories, and the poetics of the world. Her works are active storytelling, however she wants her audience to create their own stories. Perhaps this is why the works remain untitled.
Evoking the Senses
During my visits, I became aware of the array of senses that were evoked upon different viewings. After the initial visual overload and awe, the negative space that Odundo’s work commands struck me as a defining quality. The forms are strong and bold; the space that they do not occupy cuts through the stillness of their presence. Odundo treats the inside and outside with the same degree of care and considers the space that they occupy as important as the void around them.10 In theory, all of her vessels could be used functionally. They are vessels. Yet, Odundo eschews the age-old dichotomy between form and function in the ceramic canon, for this dichotomy it is irrelevant. Time is also present: its compression amplified with her work spanning four decades. Odundo works on several pieces at a time, with no assistance, and averages the completion of only ten works every two years.
Light, another visual sense that is evoked, dances, moves, and glistens with varying levels of sheen as the viewer moves around each piece. A nod to the installation crew: all aspects of exhibition design were executed expertly. Unexpectedly, there is sound—the urgency to sing into the open mouths of the vessels to hear how each might resonate in its own sphere, echo, or project. This feeling is reinforced by the gramophone-like shape of many of the wide-mouthed pieces.11 Additionally, there is an innate call that beckons the viewer to reach out and thump the gourd-like forms, to manifest rhythm, to hear the pieces. A counterpoint to myobservations, Odundo spoke of the silences in her work, “where all my spirits are hidden.”
Dame Magdalene Odundo’s solo exhibition, Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects, was on view at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Canada, October 19, 2023, to April 21, 2024.
the author Heidi McKenzie is an artist, author, and curator living in Toronto, Canada. Learn more at www.heidimckenzie.ca.
1 Heidi McKenzie’s work, Division, was featured alongside Magdalene Odundo’s work in “Underneath Everything: Humility and Grandeur in Contemporary Ceramics,” Des Moines Art Centre, Iowa.
2 Untitled, 2012, Denyse Thomasos (Canadian, born Trinidad, 1964-2012), acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of Dr. Kenneth Montague, the Wedge Collection, Toronto.
3 Emotional alphabet Research/Hunting, 2016, Eddy Firmin (Canadian, born Guadeloupe, b. 1971), ceramic, Gardiner Museum, G20.12.2.
4 Horse with Baggage #1, 2005-2006, Jean-Pierre Larocque (Canadian, born 1953), Stoneware with glaze, 101.6 Å~ 81.3 Å~ 55.9 cm (40 Å~ 32 Å~ 22 in.), The Diana Reitberger Collection, Gift in Honour of Edmund and Renate Reitberger. G14.11.5.
5 Scrum, Seared Figure iii, Twist, Figurative Print, 2011. Magdalene Odundo, (Bristish, born Kenya, b. 1950), silk screen print on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
6 Vessel Sketch 1, 2009, Magdalene Odundo, pencil on paper. Courtesy of the artist; Vessel Sketch II, Magdalene Odundo, ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
7 Les Fiancés (Betrothed), 1957, Marc Chagall (Belorussian, 1887-1985), earthenware with glazes, Gardiner Museum. Gift of Bram and Bluma Appel. G05.19.1.
8 Female Figure Pendant, 1200-1600 CE, Unknown artist, Thule culture, Bellot Strait, Boothia Peninsula, Nunavut, ivory. Royal Ontario Museum. 949.120.20.
9 Female Votive Figure, c. 2300-2200 BCE, Unknown artist, Cyclades, Greece. Parian marble, Royal Ontario Museum. 929.22.5.
10 All references to Odundo’s views or direct quotes are from notes taken from Odundo’s in-person comments as documented by the author on one of three occasions at the Gardiner Museum, October, 2023.
11 Examples of Untitled wide-mouthed vessels.
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