Untitled Vessel, Symmetrical Series

Untitled Vessel, Symmetrical Series is representative of the gleaming, minimalistic forms that have come to define Magdalene Odundo’s output. Over the past fifty years, the ceramic artist has created an oeuvre that revolves around vessels made almost invariably of English red clay and always by hand. Bypassing traditional throwing techniques and the mechanical pottery wheel, these voluptuous, streamlined objects, which often possess anthropomorphic features reminiscent of vertebrae, noses, and other body parts—“I do not see the difference between a figurative sculpture and a figurative vessel,” Odundo has remarked, are generated through laborious hand-­ coiling methods before the artist levels and smooths them with a shell and burnishes them by hand both before and after firing.