Martin Heidegger might have understood the priority Odundo gives the hollow, though he pictured his potter at a wheel. He delivered “The Thing” at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1950, six months after first reading it in Bremen and while still barred from teaching for his part in National Socialism. The lecture turns early to the atom bomb, whose explosion is for Heidegger merely the “grossest of all gross confirmations” of a loss already complete: science, by treating the world as measurable matter, had annihilated the thing long before the bomb fell. Against that loss he sets a jug, whose thingness, he insists, lies wholly in the emptiness its clay surrounds. The potter, in his phrase, “shapes the void“, which holds by taking in and keeping what it is given, a holding fulfilled only in the pour: “The jug’s jug-character consists in the poured gift of the pouring out.” In German the gift is a Geschenk, and schenken means at once to pour a drink and to give it. The gift may be drink for mortals, my Earl Grey among them, or a libation for the gods, and here Odundo’s thinking runs closest to his before it turns. His gift leaves the jug and rises to the gods. Odundo’s vessels close on whatever crosses the rim, making a permenence of what Heidegger counted a pause, as an urn, filled once, keeps its ashes long after the mourners have gone home. She has told the writer Ben Okri who it is that comes in: “thirsty ancestors lurking in empty space”. They follow the eye’s path, over the lip of the studded vessel and down its throat, and there they settle to wait.
Odundo’s vessels withhold the pour. Kwali’s waterpots came from a tradition that prized a pot for carrying water and keeping it cool; Odundo kept the coiling and the full curve of the body and let the use go, drawing the form upward and widening the rim until it could only spill. The vessel with ring handles, tall and “of a port in air”, as Stevens has it, shows this most plainly. From a body as round as a gourd, a slender neck mottled like tortoiseshell rises and flares by degrees into the bell of a trumpt. Where neck and body meet, two ring handles stand out like grips offered to a hand that might lift the pot and tip it. A short row of spikes runs up the back of the neck like a spine, so that the pot has a back as well as a front: “You can never see front and back at the same time,” Odundo says, of pots and people alike, as she turns the pot around to show me all its sides. Heidegger allows that even an empty jug “retains its nature by virtue of the poured gift”. Her vessels keep theirs by the same gift, which has passed from the drink into the form. Part of it lies in the profile, whose swelling belly and turning neck seem caught on the point of tilting. The rest lies in the surfacem a terra sigillata, or fine slip of the same clay, which she burnishes for days with polished stones and metal spoons until it takes light like skin. The kiln supplies the colour. Given air, the terracotta fires orange; smothered in smoke, it carbonises blackm and repeated firings lay the black over the orange in banks and veils. What Heidegger’s jug gives the mouth, hers give the eye.

The squat vessel carries the sea. Its body is broader than it is tall, under a neck banded orange and black and a rim as wide as a basin. Low across it the smoke has left a ragged dark edge beneath a drift of ochre cloud, subtly suggestive of a horizon or a tideline, and a t the widest point a pair of tiny, pierced lugs, made to take a cord, sits empty. In the studio a model of the Cutty Sark sails under glass, the clipper built to race China tea to London. Through the eighteenth century the English cup was sweetened with sugar grown by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, and on the wall nearby hang two colour printouts with depictions from that century, when the British trade was at its height. One is the anti-slavery medallion that Josiah Wedgwood, the most celebrated English potter of his day, produced in 1787, a kneeling, shackled figure in black on white jasper asking, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” The other is Gabriel Mathias’s 1749 portrait of William Ansah Sessarakoo, son of a Fante slave merchant of Anomabu, who was himself sold into slavery in Barbados by the captain entrusted with his passage to England. Redeemed, he was fêted in London as “the African Prince” and painted in a scarlet coat; back on the Gold Coast, he took up his father’s trade. “Slavery has not been dealt with an we refuse to listen, ” Odundo says, “so we have modern slavery.” Death by water goes on in the frail crossings still made by those with least protection, and on the squat vessel the tideline stays where the water left it. The art market crosses the sea too, and it takes the dead as well. Odundo explains the wooden memorial sculptures stolen from Kenya, the vivango of the Mijikenda peoples: carved hardwood posts that each incarnate an ancestor and are tended by the family with libations of palm wine. In the early 1980s a Giriama elder, known in the anthropological record as Katana, raised two for his dead brothers; in 1985 both were stolen, and fifteen years later they turned up in American university museums. Collectors liked to call such posts abandoned, though for the Giriama there is no such thing as an abandoned kigango, and Odundo has watched the same misreading overtake pots. “Those pots now in museums and viewed as sculptural pots were made as remembrance pieces, perhaps to embody someone who has died, ” she told Okri. Her own vessels enter the gallery knowing this, memorials made to be seen.

The dead came into Odundo’s life early. Raised a Catholic, she lost one parent when she was eight and the other when she was ten (her father died in 1958 and her mother in 1960), and one the first things she remembers is their funerals; she still wonders what her mother and father would make of the pots. A childhood is a poor key to a life’s work, and which of those days stayed with her is hers to know. Imagine them all the same: a requiem in the years before the Second Vatican Council, when the priest still wore black for the dead, the smoke spiralling from the swung thurible over a coffin that would leave the church on the shoulders of its bearers. Then look again at the three vessels, whose blacks come from smoke starved of air, and whose shoulders, like the bearer’s, take the weight of the dark held beneath them The Mass of that childhood turns on a vessel too; a cup raised at the altar and drained. Sanguis Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam . Odundo puts the case more plainly. “A pot is a pot, but it is more than that,” she says. “That’s why we are cremated and buried in a vessel, that’s why the chiefs and kings and pharaohs are buried with their armies in chambers. They are carried in vessels into the afterlife.” Her own vessels are carrriers, too, and what they ferry across is held by a wall of fired clay. At the lip of the studded vessel the wall comes to an edge, where the orange and the black meet across its thickness. Rims, Odundo has said, let you “imagine being part of the void that is inside”; the rim is “an edge that enables you to think of the fragility of the pot”. The partition there is as slight as the one that, for her, divides this world from the afterlife, which she calls “luminous and numinous …so thin.”

For this exhibition, Odundo has also selected 11 works on paper. Less often seen than her pots, they make a fitting gift to a gallery so long committed to the medium. Her pots go untitled, while the drawings take their names from the art-school life room: “Repose”, “Seated Figure”, “Twist”. Calligraphic is the word for their marks, each of which looks to have arrived whole, in one tempestuous movement and often in what appears a single stroke. Into a pot go long days and patient weeks of burnishing and firing; paint on paper, it seems, takes a breath. Here, for once, Odundo begins outside. Where a stroke closes round a figure, the white it encloses becomes the hollow, made last where in clay it comes first. And on paper, at last, something ours: the wet her pots hold back runs off the brush, and the sheet takes it in as fast as it falls. The bodies the vessels only suggest come into the open, and in “Twist” a torso, albeit abstract, turns far enough for front and back to show together. The sheet is a partition finer than any rim. By the time I leave, my cup is empty, and the pots, as she promised, are still full.

Text by Matthew Holman

Magdalene A N Odundo (1950 Nairobi, Kenya) received her initial training as a graphic artist in Kenya before moving to the UK in 1971. She studied at the Cambridge School of Art (now Anglia Ruskin University), the University for the Creative Arts and the Royal College of Art. In 2018, Odundo was appointed Chancellor of the University for Creative Arts (UCA) and was made a Dame in the Queen’s New Year Honours list in 2020.

Selected solo shows: 2025 Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium; 2024 Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK; 2023 The Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada; 2021 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK; 2019 Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, UK; Hepworth Wakefield, UK; 2016 James Hockey Gallery, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK; 2014-2015 The National Glass Centre, University of Sunderland, Sunderland, UK; 2013 Pierre Marie Giraud, Brussels, Belgium; 2009 Bluecoat Display Centre, Liverpool, UK; 2008 Jeffe-Friede Gallery, Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA; 2005 British Council, Nairobi, Kenya; 2004 Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK; 2002 Michael Hue-Williams Fine Art Ltd, London, UK; Foyer Gallery, Surrey Institute of Art and Design, UK; Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth, UK; 2001 Blackwell House, Bowness, Cumbria, UK; 1998 List Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA; 1997 Micheal Hue-Williams Fine Art Ltd, London, UK; Pro-Art, St. Louis, USA; 1995 University Art Museum, Santa Barbara, USA; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, USA; The Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, USA; The Newark Museum, Newark, USA; The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Inst., Washington, DC, USA; Indiana University Museum of Art, Bloomington, USA; Saint Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, USA; Museum of Mankind (British Museum), London, UK; 1994 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; 1993 Sloss Institute for Metal Arts, at The Historical Landmark Museum, Birmingham, USA; 1992 Oxford Gallery, Oxford, UK; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg; Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe; 1989 Kunstformen, Jetzt, Salzburg, Austria; 1988 Beaux Arts, Bath, UK; 1987 Anne Berthoud Gallery, London, UK; 1986 Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; 1985 African Heritage, Nairobi, Kenya; 1983 Crafts Council, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK; The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, UK; 1982-1984 Rosenthal Studio-Haus, Hamburg, Germany; Rosenthal Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany; Rosenthal London, London, UK; 1979-1982 Commonwealth Institute, London, UK; 1977 Africa Centre, London, UK.

Public Collections (Selection): The Art Institute of Chicago, USA; The Ashmolean Museum, London, UK; Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, Germany; British Museum, London, UK; Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, USA; Commonwealth Institute London, UK; Crafts Council, London, UK; de Young Museum, San Francisco, USA; Detroit Institute of Arts, USA; Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum, Munich, Germany; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK; The Hepworth Wakefield Museum, Wakefield, UK; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany; National Museum of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya; Princeton University Museum, Princeton, USA; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, USA; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Tate, London, UK; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK.