Magdalene Odundo on her work

From the Gardiner Museum exhibit "A Dialogue with Objects"

This semester, I have started all my classes with this 4 minute video featuring Magdalene Odundo talking about her work. It’s such a beautiful statement, and aligns with much of my own approach to working with clay. The video was created for Odundo’s exhibition, A Dialogue with Objects, on view at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto through April 21, 2024

Here’s the video, and I have also typed out much of the statement below:

Magdalene Odundo on her work (excerpted transcript from the above video):

I am attracted to clay simply because clay is a wonderful material to work in. It’s the intrinsic properties of clay: utilitarian, durability. Its plasticity allows for all sorts of shapes and forms. It’s also a very simple material, very natural material, that throughout human history has always attracted people to form objects in clay. The first time I actually encountered clay, I just literally fell in love with it.

The words we use in making clay, in making clay objects, are always referencing human beings. We talk about the body of the piece. We talk about the shoulders, the neck. That idea of being able to make something that is hollow and solid at the same time. That it has an inside and outside. A human being embodies that whole concept of inside and outside. My thinking process, my being and who I am, is defined by the inside of those pieces. The outside is the show that I present to the public and to the owner of the work. 

My personal response (to the exhibition) is really, perhaps an achievement of being able to model and make something out of a very simple material, but also to simplify my own life that gets basically embedded in an object, an object that then other people engage with and perhaps find astonishment and amazement. 

….

For me it’s very important to have a context in which you work in. Mine is the search for how things have been made in the past, how other artists are tackling issues that are important to them, in contemporary manner. It informs me, and it’s a reference to where I’m placed in that canon of art and living.

I hope that in my works, there’s a breath of life.

For more on the exhibition, visit the Gardiner Museum exhibition page.