Magdalene Odundo: The Journey of Things, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, review: profoundly intimate and universally human
When Magdalene Odundo was studying at the Royal College of Art, her professor, Eduardo Paolozzi, urged her to look to the British Museum for inspiration. There, her attention was taken by works by the Victorian designer Christopher Dresser. His belief that an artist should study “whatever has gone before, not with a view to becoming a copyist, but with the object of gaining knowledge, and of seeking out general truths and broad principles,” has been foundational to Odundo’s career.
Dresser’s Linthorpe ‘urchin’ vessel (1882), part-echinoderm, part-Peruvian ‘stirrup’ pot, is one of some 80 works that Odundo has chosen to place in silent discourse with 50 of her own pieces in this show. For it she has selected objects that have influenced—or resonated with—her own practice, acknowledging the key role museums played in her own artistic journey.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1950, Odundo moved to Cambridge to study graphic design. In the city’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, artefacts from Oceania sparked her imagination. The consistent black and terracotta palette of her own, highly burnished vessels were inspired by Egyptian beakers seen at the Fitzwilliam. At Kettle’s Yard, she encountered sculpture by Moore and Hepworth, also on show here. On seeing Gaudier-Brzeska’s Bird Swallowing a Fish (1914) she thought it was from Africa. It took European modernists to lead Odundo to appreciate African art, dismissed as “primitive” during her Catholic schooling, heavily influenced by Kenya’s colonial status.
The exhibition pays homage to Odundo’s further educational roots within the British studio pottery tradition. Lucie Rie and Hans Coper also recognised the richness of ancient civilisations. Rie’s flared-rim bottles with their scratched incisions could have been discovered in a Pharaoh’s tomb; Coper’s delicate-as-egg-shell forms echo the Cycladic heads that stand sentinel nearby. But it was Michael Cardew who had the most profound, personal influence on Odundo, encouraging her to learn traditional techniques in Nigeria.
Odundo’s process is arduous. Pieces are hand-built over long periods, encouraging reflection and a dialogue between the material and the maker, who allows herself to be guided by the clay’s qualities and quirks. While smoothed to perfection inside, some of these vessels’ dimpled surfaces evoke the ritual scarification of the skin with which Odundo is familiar from her own family heritage. The seductive outlines of some of these pieces morph into lethal, spiked edges and razor-thin rims that take her hours to perfect.Like a ceremonial dagger, beauty can also belie danger.
The leading British architect, Sir David Adjaye, has designed this exhibition as a series of “islands” on which such items made centuries and worlds apart converse, sometimes in close proximity, sometimes across the gallery. A tightly wound Rodin dancer reverberates with Odundo’s twisting, precariously poised pots, which appear like ballerinas frozen on pointe. An exquisite 16th century golden bird’s head from Colombia’s pre-Hispanic Sinú culture calls across to the distorted necks emerging out of Odundo’s orb-like bases.
More recently, Odundo has developed a new interest in glass-blown forms, resulting in monumental statements such as Transition II. 1,001 individual, ostensibly identical, glass vessels—based on an ancient Egyptian ear decoration—are suspended from the ceiling in an undulating wave to evoke, perhaps, a murmuration of birds. In its suggestion of the migration of peoples, the installation provides what is already a spiritually uplifting exhibition with a breath-taking climax.
Human expression in all its myriad diversity seems to be coded into the DNA of Odundo’s works, breaking down the barriers of such polarising classifications as art and craft, beauty and function, African and European, pot and sculpture. Displayed to resonate with the sources of her inspiration, her art proves itself to be at once timeless and contemporary, earthbound and transcendent, profoundly intimate and universally human, worthy to be seen—and not out of place—alongside those that have stood the test of all time.
Open until December 15. Tickets: 01603 593199; scva.ac.uk
