Contemporary British Studio Pottery

Magdalene Odundo: Glossolalia

In my own work, my vocabulary is deliberately minimal. I do not want my pots to require lengthy explanation. I want them to feel empathetic, I want people to be able to understand them visually. For me, visual literacy, looking and noticing, is the most important thing. Viewers are welcome to imbue the work with whatever they want, but the words come second. The work, the vessel, must come first.46

To mark the end of the twentieth century, Dame Magdalene Odundo OBE produced a series of Millennium Jugs (as well as Millennium Cups) in white earthenware. Such unassuming domestically scaled pots might appear a curious introduction to the grander terracotta forms for which Odundo is internationally recognised. Yet, I begin with these inventive works because they exemplify key concepts that can be discerned elsewhere. The jug itself is formed with a rounded base and cannot stand by itself. A separate concave foot affords it a supported place to rest. Consequently, the jug can - if desired - be manipulated to stand at obtuse angles from its base, to tilt so that the symmetrical balance of the jug is disrupted. This interplay between symmetry and asymmetry is, as Emmanuel Cooper pointed out in his excellent assessment of Odundo's oeuvre, a central compositional concern in much of her work.47 More significantly, as a piece made to commemorate the millennium, the jug points in two directions. The extruded handle curves away from the body in an upward direction, whilst the extruded 'spout' curves downwards away from the lip. The body of the jug is thus located at the interstice between these directions, redolent of the move between centuries, and symbolic of looking both backwards and forwards. Setting the jug into its base at one angle or another (either towards the handle or, conversely, towards the lip) implies a leaning towards history or the future, whilst the jug positioned upright (as photographed) emblemises attenuation to the present. Thus, the jug is a container of uncertainty and anxiety around moments of passage from one epoch to the next. The inability of the jug to stand without its concave base might even symbolise our need for rituals, and associated objects, to ground us during periods of transition.

Millennium Jug (1999).

Millennium Jug (1999) alludes to the wider liminality of Odundo's work; how it sits in and out of time. In museums, her pots blend effortlessly with examples of ancient ceramics from Africa or South America. Out of an interminable desire to comprehend the expressive potential of clay, the cultural and religious significance of pottery across thousands of years, pursued through decades of study, exudes from her fingertips. Yet, in the contemporary art gallery, Odundo's work commands its own presence and her instantly recognisable pots are internationally sought-after. Her forms curve across continents in every sense; she fashions visual patchworks that situate the present within the past and enmesh the present into the future. As with the Millennium Jug, her pots are Janus-faced, looking backwards and forwards from their own temporality.

It is, however, axiomatic that pots transcend linguistic, religious, and cultural specificity. A look around the ceramics collection of any museum confirms this. What risks the prosaic becomes, in Odundo's hands, perceptive and enriching. Her emphasis on visual literacy implies an understanding of how the personal moves into the universal and back again. The perceptions of the artist are cast in the primordial visual language of clay for universal comprehension, but meaning is not a given; it is always context-specific, being inflected - accented - with a particular syntax in the moment of experience. Pots may possess a universal visual language, but meanings shift, are revised, or re-inscribed. Odundo challenges us to read visually. Interpretation comes later. But what is it, exactly, that we are being asked to read?

A clue to this lies in Odundo's early ceramic training. Born in Kenya, Odundo travelled to England to study at the Cambridge College of Art from 1971-73, and then the West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham from 1973-1976, where Henry Hammond (1914-1989) was the Head of Ceramics. Hammond, whose aesthetic was derived from Anglo-Orientalism, took his students on field trips, including to St Ives, where Odundo and her fellow classmates had the opportunity to meet Bernard Leach in 1974. Soon after, following a meeting with the Leach potter Michael Cardew (1901-1983), Odundo learned of the Abuja pottery that Cardew had himself set up in Nigeria, and travelled there to study for a few months in the summer of 1974. Then, in 1976, Odundo travelled to California and was able to see the Native American potter Maria Martinez (1887-1980) at work.48 Even from this brief summary of Odundo's activities in the early years of her ceramic education (she later went to the Royal College of Art from 1979-1982), there is an obvious fascination with the transnational movement of potters, potteries, and pots.

It is no coincidence, then, that Odundo found sympathy with some of the internationalist and universalist ideas of Bernard Leach. As Odundo herself stated:

Coming from a family where, for my dad, travelling had been a part of work, it seemed that Leach was describing a very enriching culture. [.] I thought the philosophy Bernard Leach was advocating, which I understood to be about being engaged in making objects or making art, was sound and relevant.49

Leach was a believer in the Bahá'í faith, a syncretic religion dating from the nineteenth century that seeks the realisation of a divine cosmopolitan world order. As Leach himself wrote, Bahá'í promised a unified world via:

principles of independent investigation, [.] unity, [.] roots in justice, universal education, balance of religion and science, marriage of East and West, recognition of art, of the equality of men and women, the need of a common language, the abolition of both great wealth and great poverty, and, to these ends, of a universal parliament of man [sic .].50

The cosmopolitanism of Bahá'í provided Leach with a philosophical and spiritual means of reconciling himself with his own sense of hybridity. Born in Hong Kong, and spending much of his life moving between Britain and Japan (and elsewhere), Leach recognised that Bahá'í offered a rationale for his practice, which 'was inextricably becoming rooted to two hemispheres', and that he considered placed him as 'a courier between East and West'.51

In A Potter's Portfolio, first published in 1951, and which was then subsequently edited into The Potter's Challenge, first published in 1975, Leach sought to expound upon the ability of pottery to communicate universally:

The pot is the man [sic], he a focal point in his race, and it in turn is held together by traditions imbedded in a culture. In our day, the threads have been loosened and a creative mind finds itself alone with the responsibility of discovering its own meaning and pattern out of the warp and weft of all traditions and all cultures. Without achieving integration or wholeness he cannot compass the extended vision and extract from it a true synthesis.52

To provide a sense of how this synthesis was achieved, Leach included numerous examples of 'Exemplary Pots' which, aside from a few examples from Ancient Greece, America, and the Middle East, came from East Asia. To introduce these 'Exemplary Pots', Leach included diagrammatic analyses of two Chinese Song dynasty (960-1279) works: a vase and a bottle. The analysis of the vase, reproduced here, divides the form into different ratios, some documenting lines of correlation between the base and the rim, others exploring how compositional spheres exert control over mass and volume. By placing these illustrations before the reproductions of 'Exemplary Pots', Leach was clearly encouraging the reader to apply these ideas across the illustrations, and by extension, to their own practice.

Analysis of a Song Dynasty Vase by Bernard Leach.
(Reproduced by kind permission of Profile Books)

In turning towards Odundo, it would be easy to overstate her connection with Bernard Leach's philosophy. Her relationship to Leach should be regarded as a general, if critical, sense of compatibility; Leach never taught Odundo. Nevertheless, in some of her work from the early 1980s, there is a stylistic fusion of form inspired by Abuja pottery and the black burnished pots of Maria Martinez. In the example reproduced here, Odundo has carved into the top section of the pot, creating a spherical pattern that both alludes to and disguises some of the compositional elements discerned by Leach. She has positioned the lines as being lower than - in parallel with, rather than as actual markers of - the 'major sphere' of the pot. This gives the feeling that the upper and lower sections are exerting pressure on one another, affording the work a dynamic presence despite its apparent simplicity.

Angled Mixed-Colour Piece (1989).

Stages in the analysis of Angled Mixed-Colour Piece (1989).

Angled Mixed-Colour Piece (1989) with lines of analysis. The numbers relate to points in the preceding text.

The parallels between Leach's diagram and the early examples of Odundo's output as illustrated here may be superficial, but they nevertheless invite a more...