Odundo Obsessive for Clay

Lectures on distinguished artists are a dime a dozen, particularly at Harvard. But it’s rare for an expert to speak about an artist immediately after the artist herself has spoken. This was exactly what took place at the Harvard Ceramics Studio last Saturday when a lecture by Magdalene Odundo, a distinguished African ceramicist, was followed by History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies Professor Suzanne Blier’s talk about the significance of Odundo’s work in the intellectual and artistic community.

“I’ve never seen a professor give a talk about an artist sitting two feet in front of her,” said Cathleen D. McCormick, Director of Programs for the Office for the Arts at Harvard.

Odundo—who was born in Nairobi and now resides in Hampshire, UK, where she teaches at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham—discussed her more recent work with vessels as well as her inspiration since she began creating pottery around 1975.

“My whole idea of living as an artist is to be observant of what happens around me,” Odundo said. “Nuances like the drip of water droplets are very important to me.” She draws her inspiration from these careful observations, especially those of women, the activities that humans use their own bodies for, and depictions of African people. “Years ago, I saw a beautiful, pregnant young girl coming out of a train station. I remember being completely overwhelmed,” Odundo said. “The body as a vessel is a very important aspect. The woman’s body tends to change. It is a carrying vessel.”

Inspired by the thinness of human skin, Odundo explained the physical lightness of her pottery, admitting that the practicality of moving her vessels also plays a role in her creative process.

“[The pieces] are very light, and when I went to the Royal College, I deliberately wanted to overcome the transportation issues of large pieces,” she explained. “The walls of pieces don’t have to be that thick. I used a ‘pull and pinch’ method.”

Professor Blier then focused on Odundo’s work in the context of African art’s importance to the Western world.

“To me, one of the reasons I love African art is because the primacy of sculpture,” she said. “In [Odundo’s] works as well, it is almost as if the work becomes a new work as one moves around it and looks at its various shapes.”

“I see a certain playfulness, but there is the moving of an element that really draws our attention to it and challenges our notions of what a vessel is and should be,” Blier said. “That playfulness is something which I come back to very frequently in looking at her works.”

Blier additionally explained her frustration with the tendency for African work to be denied admittance to many museums on the basis that it is simply “traditional craft.”

“There have been real struggles for primacy of place in terms of acknowledgement of contemporary African art in the field of art history,” said Blier. “One of my real fights since I’ve been here is to bring African art into the art museum.”

But while museum curators have yet to embrace the work of African artists, Odundo’s work shows that there is a place for this “traditional craft” in the academic artistic community.

“I’m a sculptor, and I am so inspired by her,” audience member Libby A. Maclaren said, explaining that Odundo’s pottery had always had a significant impact on her, as had recently visiting Odundo’s exhibiton “Black Womanhood” at Wellesley College. “Her forms are very, very beautiful, very elegant.”

And Odundo made certain to convey her unwavering love for the art form while discussing her specific exhibitions and her work’s artistic importance. “I’m very passionate about clay,” she said. “I’m actually obsessively passionate about clay.”