British Crafts Centre, London

Private Collection, United Kingdom

Maak, London

Salon 94, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

“What is so beautiful about the pot that it conveys a universal language, that of spiritual utility and aesthetic. It is revered and understood by all and therefore important to all...What else can tell you about human life more than a pot does?”

“I’ve always been inspired — obsessed, really — by the human form and the connection between us and everything around us,” Magdalene Odundo told Architectural Digest in 2024. That fascination has guided her from a brief early career in advertising to a life’s practice in clay, a medium she describes as “the most versatile and pliable and naturally earthly, sympathetic and human.”

Odundo’s vessels, such as Angled Ribbed Pot (1984), seem at once ancient and utterly contemporary. Hand-built rather than wheel-thrown, their burnished surfaces gleam like polished skin. “Each work originates with a ball of clay which is gradually hollowed out and pulled upwards,” she has explained. “Unlike throwing on a wheel, where the piece of clay is worked mechanically and shaped by relatively stable hands, I am the one moving around the work, or moving a turntable to shape each aspect of the form.” The body — her own and the one implied in the pot — becomes inseparable from the act of making.

Born in Nairobi and raised in Kenya before moving to Britain in 1971, Odundo’s artistic journey was defined, as she puts it, “by travel.” While studying graphic design at Farnham School of Art, she encountered the potter Michael Cardew, who encouraged her to apprentice at the Abuja Pottery in Nigeria. There, under the guidance of fellow female potters Ladi Kwali and Lami Toto, Odundo experienced what she calls “a conversation through activity, through body language, through a twist of the hand, a twist of the mind.”

Because she did not speak Hausa, her learning was tactile and gestural. “Every time I made a piece, the tutors would touch it,” she recalled. “That manifestation of their touch—Kwali’s hand guiding my hand with the clay—was an amazing experience. There was a real sense of a more experienced person migrating their knowledge and transferring it onto a younger person.”

That tradition of embodied knowledge infuses Odundo’s own vessels, which she often likens to the human body. Their swelling bellies, tapering necks, and angled ribs evoke breathing, bending, and balance. “Using the human form is a very natural way of sculpting with clay,” she has said. “After all, the Bible says that God took clay and used it to form man.” For Odundo, clay is not simply material; it is metaphor — alive, responsive, and capable of speech. “It had a language,” she remembers realizing in Nigeria. “Put in the hands of a willing person, it spoke for itself.”

Her pots are also deeply cross-cultural, shaped by the convergence of African, European, and Asian traditions. The burnishing recalls classical Greek amphorae; the coiling and smoking processes echo indigenous African and pre-Columbian techniques. They are, she says, “hybrid creations” — vessels of migration as much as of form. Angled Ribbed Pot, with its full, rounded body and precisely canted blade-like rim, embodies this synthesis: part architecture, part anatomy, simultaneously ancient artifact and modern sculpture.

Today Odundo’s works reside in more than 50 public collections, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the British Museum. Yet despite their global reach, her vessels retain the humility of touch. “The process of hand building with clay,” she says, “is fused with sound and bodily movement. That leads to an awareness of the form and shape you are making. It’s really a special way of learning.” Her Angled Ribbed Pot stands as both an object and an echo: of bodies that move and make, of knowledge passed through touch, of a humanity that, quite literally, takes shape in clay.