A Ceramic Sculpture by Magdalene Odundo, 1993

rising from a small circular bottom, the spherical body surmounted by a cylindrical neck with two rings to the sides leading to a horizontally flaring end; 'Odundo 1993' engraved on bottom; fine polished and carbonized surface.

Anthony Slayter-Ralph Fine Art, Santa Barbara
Acquired from the above, ca. 1994

Anthony Slayter-Ralph (ed.), Magdalene Odundo, Hampshire and Burlington, 2004, p. 118, cat. 109

Excellent condition.
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Much of Kenyan born (1950, Nairobi) Magdalene Odundo's inspiration is drawn from the ceramic tradition of her roots on the Ugandan/Kenyan border. In keeping with modern sculptors (such as Brancusi and Arp) she focuses on the search for perfection in form. Working within a highly personal and meaningful artistic idiom, Odundo's vessels are not meant to be used as physical containers but rather as transcendental ones.

Odundo's ceramics are hand built, using a coiling technique. She does not use the wheel, preferring instead to shape her vessels without its restraints of rotational symmetry. Similarly, the surfaces on her vessels are not glazed but instead 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, as in this case, often a second time, enclosed in a special container filled with wood chips and shavings, so that the combustion of the wood fuel in an oxygen-poor, "reduced" atmosphere causes the clay to chemically alter and turn black or, as in the Rosenthal vessel, anthracite.

Odundo's work is represented in over 40 public collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The British Museum, London, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The National Museum of African Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (both at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.