A Dialogue with Objects

Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects features the exquisite sculptural vessels of one of the world’s most renowned ceramic artists, Dame Magdalene Odundo. Her first exhibition in Canada and the largest ever presentation of her work in North America, the show brings together works spanning the artist’s career, including new pieces directly from her studio. Odundo’s work will be in dialogue with art and artifacts from many time periods and cultures, ranging from ancient Mediterranean figurines to monumental Abstract Expressionist painting, to explore the connections that unite us as humans. These dialogues, and Odundo’s practice, model working trans-culturally in ways that are neither colonial nor extractive, while interrogating the role of museum collections of historical objects as well as hierarchies of Western art.

Since the early 1980s, the British-Kenyan artist has pursued a singular vision centered on the refined, magisterial ceramic vessel. Made entirely by hand and finished to a smooth, lustrous sheen, these works are uniquely her own while synthesizing traditions of ceramics and other media from multiple global cultures.

Odundo’s sensuous vessels, with their vibrant orange and velvety black surfaces, reference the human body; their rounded bellies and elongated necks evoking a sense of energy and movement. The artist works on a single vessel for months, slowly and rhythmically, pouring years of experimentation and technical mastery into each piece. Odundo’s work can be found in the world’s preeminent collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, National Museum of African Art, The British Museum, The Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Gardiner Museum.

The carbonized terracotta vessel, which will be featured in the exhibition, was made by Odundo in 2003 and is the only work by the artist in a public collection in Canada.

Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects comes almost four years after the biggest ever display of the artist’s work, Magdalene Odundo: The Journey of Things, opened at The Hepworth Wakefield in the UK. Like the acclaimed British presentation, the exhibition at the Gardiner Museum will feature Odundo’s work with contextual objects from art and archaeology, giving insight into her global influences.

As a student in England, Odundo began visiting British museums where she first encountered such works. While amassed as an assertion of colonial power and authority, Odundo engaged these collections as an artist, woman, and potter from the global south, finding connections between them and the world she experienced growing up in Kenya.

Learn more about Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects at Gardiner Museum