Dame Magdalene Anyango Namakhiya Odundo 1950 - Present
Magdalene Odundo, the contemporary super ceramicist, talented, amazingly cheerful and master of her domain. She’s a Kenyan-born British ceramicist with origins from Western Kenya but grew up in the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya. During her young years, she would live a brief spell in India before returning to Kenya. Born in 1950, Odundo had a deep interest in artistic projects. She worked in advertising for a neon-sign company as an assistant designer after high school.
Subsequently, she attended evening classes at the Kabete National Polytechnic to study design, layout, and graphics. And in 1971, thanks to Isabel Beverly, her godmother, Odundo got sponsored to Cambridge College of Art in Britain, to study a foundation course in art but ended up doing a commercial art course.
Her interest in ethnographic and anthropological material was sparked off when she visited the Fitzwilliam museum and subsequently the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology in Britain. Onwards, working with clay as a medium of artistic expression became an intriguing art form for her.
‘I’ve always equated clay with the humanity that’s within us, fragile like our bodies. It can tip over. You have it on its toes, but if you push just slightly on the wrong pivot, it will break your heart,’ she said in an interview.
Odundo recalls fetching water in earthenware pots together with her siblings during her early years as a teenage girl. She would enroll at the West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham to pursue her interest in ceramics, thanks to Zoe Ellison’s advice.
It’s her visit to the Abuja centre in Nigeria that was particularly enriching. The centre was a potters’ training school established by the acclaimed English potter and teacher, Michael Cardew. And here, she had the opportunity to learn how to produce ceramic work in a wooden Kiln based on Nigerian Gwari pottery traditions.
Odundo’s tutelage under Ladi Kwali, another internationally acclaimed ceramist and a teacher at the centre, equipped her with handbuilding techniques in pottery. Subsequently, the technique became a distinctive feature of her design process. Fascinated by the ceramic work produced by rural communities in Africa, she would come back to Kenya in 1975 to research her thesis: “A complete study of woman’s pottery techniques and the use of ceremonial vessels in rites of passage”.
Odundo’s first exhibition in Africa was staged in 1985 in celebration of the United Nations Decade of Women Conference at the African Heritage Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya. Products of her creation are just as functional as the African vessels from which she drew her inspiration. However, according to Odundo, her pieces predominantly take on a purely abstract form which blurs their utilitarian characteristic.
The notion of her vessels having an inside is a consistent theme in her work. As Odundo confesses, it’s probably how the inside of us human beings informs who we are from the outside. She also makes anthropomorphic references to the female body through her work, perhaps reinforcing the observation that most African pottery was primarily made by women. Yet still, by not conceiving of her work as vessels that can be used functionally but as sculpture — traditionally seen as a male domain, Odundo blurs the line between the two gendered domains.
Odundo is highly esteemed in England and globally as a ceramicist with several achievements in her lifelong career. From being appointed Professor of Ceramics at the University of Creative Arts, Farnham in 2001 to being appointed Dame Commander of the Order of British Empire (DBE) in 2020, she’s truly an accomplished academic and artist. In 2018 she became Chancellor of the University for Creative Arts in the UK, taking over from Dame Zandra Rhodes, the famous UK artist and fashion designer.
She has also exhibited widely in England and internationally. Examples of her work are in many public collections including African Heritage, Nairobi, The Art Institute of Chicago and the British Museum, London.
Her intriguing rise to global recognition in the art world tells a story about how her inclination to artistic projects coupled with formal learning and tenacious optimism survives in a post-colonial context where, as Margret Trowel, rightly puts it:
“any attempt to arouse interest in the indigenous crafts was met with a deep suspicion as an attempt to keep [the African students] down to a lowly level.”
Odundo’s story resembles that of Rosemary Namuli Karuga; Kenyan-born, childhood penchant for artistic illustrations, and eventually finding success and recognition abroad.
