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Magdalene Odundo (b. 1950) grew up in Kenya and moved to England in 1971 to continue her training in graphic art. Growing restless with this medium, she decided to explore the possibilities of clay. She returned to her native Africa in 1974-1975, visiting Nigeria and then Kenya, to study the ways women produce pottery using traditions of hand-building and firing that are thousands of years old. She also traveled to New Mexico and observed the women of San Ildefonso making their distinctive blackware vessels. Odundo returned to the London area where she still lives to complete a Masters degree at the Royal College of Art, having developed a style and technique of making ceramic vessels distinctly her own.

Although Odundo's work reveals a strong and deliberate association with the forms and processes of pottery produced in Africa, she is equally conversant with Euroamerican modernism, especially its explicit interest in the possibilities of form, material, and technique. She also brings to her work a familiarity with the world's ceramic history, from the vessels of Antiquity to the pottery of Jomon Japan and, more recently to Bernard Leach and the early 20th-century British vessel tradition.

Odundo's ceramics are hand built, primarily using a coiling technique. She has purposefully shunned the wheel, preferring instead to shape her vessels without its restraints of rotational symmetry. Several pieces are produced simultaneously, often taking days or even weeks to complete, and when leather-hard, each is laboriously burnished, covered with slip, and burnished again. When thoroughly dry the pots are fired in a gas kiln, first in an oxidizing atmosphere which turns them a naturally bright red-orange, and often a second time, enclosed in a special container filled with wood chipsand shavings, so that the combustion of the wood fuel in an oxygen-poor, "reduced" atmosphere causes the clay to chemically alter and turn black. Because the alchemy of reduction is not entirely predictable, certain areas of the blackened surface have wonderfully unexpected variations in coloration or even dramatic flashes of red.

Odundo's singular accomplishment, very much in the tradition of sculptors such as Brancusi or Arp, lies in her inexhaustible search for perfect form within a highly personal and meaningful artistic idiom. She creates a limited vocabulary of vessel types, concentrating on how the smallest physical additions and modifications can make the maximum aesthetic impact. No one creation is ever a definitive statement; no configuration is ever repeated precisely. Though insistent on the container reference, no vessel is meant to be used.

While never tiring of her aesthetic quest, Odundo also is "looking for something else," which has as much to do with content as it does with form. She has described her work as capturing the unfurling of a plant, the fall of a Victorian sleeve, the momentary stillness of a dancer's pose, or the silhouette of a Kenyan woman bound in layers of cloth. Although she is after a sense of movement to relieve her vessels of their innate motionlessness, she also reads in their natural forms clear physical correlates to the bodies of women. The generous curve of a pot's belly echoes the swollen womb of a pregnant woman. Vessels with sharply angled mouths, tipping backward in long, graceful sweeps, evoke the elongated foreheads, bound heads, and flaring coiffures of Mangbetu women of Zaire. Odundo is fascinated by the ways in which women's bodies--over time and across the world--have been reshaped to conform with standards of beauty often established by men to support normative social values and expectations, from the extended necks of the Zulu of South Africa, to the corseted waists of 19th-century Europe, to the bodies of contemporary fashion models starved into emaciation. Yet, Odundo resists the need to have these conceptual reference points "read," and instead invites the viewer's own associations and responses, whether based on form or content or both.

Ceramic Gestures shares the work of an artist who gives us the excitement and pleasure of exceptional beauty along with a profound respect for her rigor and discipline in synthesizing a complex and wide-ranging set of techniques, ideas, inspirations, and observations.

Support for this exhibition has come, in part, from The British Council.

Marla C. Berns, Director

All Photographs by Assassi Productions