Untitled Vessel, Symmetrical Series, 2020

Ceramic
© Magdalene A.N. Odundo; courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo by Richard Ivey.

Magdalene Odundo’s Untitled Vessel, Symmetrical Series is representative of the gleaming, minimalistic forms that have come to define the artist’s output. Over the past fifty years, she has created an oeuvre that revolves around vessels made almost invariably of English red clay. Bypassing traditional throwing techniques and the mechanical pottery wheel, Odundo generates these voluptuous, streamlined objects through laborious hand-coiling methods before leveling and smoothing them with a shell and burnishing them by hand both before and after firing. The primary color palette of her works, dark amber and ebony, reflects her firing technique: a first firing in an oxidizing atmosphere turns the clay orange, while a second firing in an oxygen-poor atmosphere causes the clay to become black, sometimes all over and sometimes in select places. The works highlight the natural hues of the material, which Odundo manipulates to produce a sense of great depth.