Songs of the earth: poetry in clay

Buy this book £35.00

Magdalene Odundo
Anthony Slayter-Ralph, ed.
2004
Lund Humphries, UK
128 pages

Reviewed by Barbara Murray

Poets compress, refine, reduce and intensify, using words as their tools. Magdalene Odundo is a poet who uses clay. Hers is a visual poetry of pure form that evokes the essential with minimal means. As with the literary form, where each word – not a syllable too many, not a sound out of place – must be precise and perfect for its purpose, so for the visual form, where each curve, each stroke, each tone of clay is exact.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1950, Magdalene Odundo showed early artistic talent at her local school and first worked as a graphic designer. She went on to study, thanks to inspired support, for a BA at the West Surrey College of Art and Design and later for an MA at the Royal College of Art in London, UK. It took some time before she found her medium and her broad arts education enabled her to look into the aesthetics and techniques of various cultures. Having decided on clay, she investigated diverse ceramic traditions of the world, absorbing ideas from early work in Egypt and the Mediterranean region, pre-Colombian pottery, and ceramics from Korea, Papua New Guinea, Europe and the Middle East. Her studies brought her into contact with some of the leading potters of the time. She met Bernard Leach and was inspired by his internationalist ideas and insights into Japanese ceramics, and visited Michael Cardew, whose pots from Nigeria created a strong response in her. She also worked with legendary pueblo potter Maria Martinez, whose smoke-firing technique made a lasting impact on the young artist still searching for her ways and means.

Two seminal experiences in 1974 seem to have re-invigorated her cultural roots and predominantly shaped her practice. The first was a sojourn in Abuja, Nigeria, where she was apprenticed to the Gwari potters and learned their hand-building techniques. The second was her return to Kenya to do research on ritual uses of pottery, which created a deep awareness of the significance of the vessel in the human imagination. Odundo went on to look at many of the pottery traditions and practices throughout Africa: the Abaluyia, B

"The smallest details evoke references to things seen, yet the deepest wellspring from which her work arises is African aesthetic values"

uganda, Chokwe, Edo Ekiti and the Mangbetu, among others. How the idea transfers through the fingers remains one of the unknowns of human creativity but these rich and diverse impressions are deep in her subconscious and reappear in unique forms as the clay takes shape under her patient hands. Her works bring to mind that poem by DH Lawrence: "Things men have made with wakened hands and put soft / life into / are awake through years with transferred touch, and go / on glowing…" In Magdalene Odundo’s work the smallest details evoke references to things seen, yet the deepest wellspring from which her work arises is African aesthetic values and, as Simon Olding notes in his essay, "(w)hen she makes a pot, she is making a pot with her grandmother and with her family past resonant in the present". Odundo draws from her inclinations and intuitions, melding them with her myriad experiences and knowledge, bringing everything together in a perfection that is imbued with the warmth of human touch.

Magdalene Odundo has been lucky to find herself in an environment that nurtures and supports this kind of artistic production. As she has worked, gradually and steadily, galleries and patrons have enabled her to make what she wishes, providing her with recognition, validation and a market, and alongside her ceramics she is able to support herself by teaching at an art school, thus avoiding the pressure of having to sell her art to survive. This supportive environment is sadly lacking in Africa at the moment. I wonder if, had she not had the opportunities to travel and study, she would have been able to develop into the artist that she is? Would that potential have been able to flower in Kenya? It is a tragedy that this kind of gift, unable to grow and express itself, lies dormant, and eventually dies unfulfilled in millions of people in Africa – writers, artists, scientists, gymnasts – so much potential lying idle, historically suppressed but now being lost due to inept governance and the resulting lack of infrastructure. Magdalene Odundo’s superb clay vessels stand quiet, balanced and strong – filled with beauty and African vision. As well as the joy and inspiration they offer, they are testimony to the huge wealth of hidden potential in our continent.

Cataloguing 143 works made between 1982 and 2003, the book provides detail and provenance, a chronology, an extensive list of solo and group exhibitions, a good bibliography and an impressive list of work in public collections (including African Heritage, Nairobi, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Washington, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the British Museum, London). The presentation of the pots is excellent, with 65 large, superbly photographed, colour reproductions. The texts in the book are well written and informative. The foreword by Sir Christopher Fraying, rector of the Royal College of Art, focuses on ‘multiculturalism’ and the nourishment that the British arts have taken from various cultural sources. Emmanuel Cooper’s clear chronological essay provides background and insight into Odundo’s development, influences and techniques, as well as a thoughtful appreciation of her work. The essay by Simon Olding reveals Odundo’s involvement in all aspects of her art, particularly her contribution to public appreciation of ceramics through her curatorship of several important exhibitions, and her other wide-ranging interests and activities encompassing metal-working, print-making, photography, education and arts development in the south of England where she lives.

The monograph is restrained and elegant, which is just as well because the pots themselves hold such a silent power. To me they embody the contained energy of a female leopard, in that moment before she springs – the darkness inside, the satin flanks of burnished terracotta, the ripple of muscle and pulse of life under smooth skin, the sheen of a deep carbon blackness, a visceral alertness. Each is a vital organ of life – a vessel of silence and energy – that comes from the intense and concentrated process of making, infusing life into the clay and holding it there, at its moment of perfect balance. Another response to Odundo’s works, quoted in the book, is by Zimbabwean artist Locardia Ndandarika who asked "How is it possible that you can make pots that look like that, like they are dancing, contorted in one direction and then the other way?" Odundo says she is "attracted to something that is almost a kind of electricity in how pliable the body can be… while it is capable of being shaped to capture that mesmerising, hypnotic achievement, the pot ends up in a motionless state." It is a process of distillation, of persuasion into fullness and perfection, to that moment when it becomes a song, or a dance, of life and earth.

The poems Magdalene Odundo makes have a deep, ceremonial Africaness. She has said: "I wanted us in Africa to look at what is our own, at the design possibilities that exist there, and to form it into a language that will be internationally recognised, but much more that we, as makers and users of this art, value our existing traditions." She has indeed achieved all this and her work needs wider exposure in Africa itself. This monograph is a celebration of her gift, her labour and the rich beauty of our continent. It should have pride of place on every African bookshelf.

Barbara Murray is a Zimbabwean artist and art critic living in London