Magdalene Odundo's pottery is inspired by a pregnant woman in a train station

Q13:19Magdalene Odundo on her life in clay

Magdalene Odundo found inspiration for her ceramic work in an unusual place: the railway station.

The world-renowned potter watched people move up and down the staircase at the station. The curves and roundness that are signature to her work took shape then. 

"I was waiting for my train and just looking at the interaction between human beings, the spaces that are left in between that create the body, the solid bodies around us," Odundo tells Tom Power in a Q interview. "Everybody has a movement that says something, that leads them to somewhere, that spells out what they are feeling."

It was in that train station that Odundo found her eternal muse: a pregnant woman with her red hair tied in a ponytail, wearing the "highest high-heel shoes" and carrying a bag of things for her future baby.

"I just thought, 'How beautiful,'" Odundo says. "She was a vessel. She was carrying some life within that body.… Everything that was about her was about containment and happiness and everything that is the best of us as human beings."

Odundo's pottery is currently on display at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, but it's also in the permanent collections of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Visitors can see that much of her ceramic work is hugely round with tiny little stems — just like that pregnant woman in high heels. 

Odundo says that potters have always been inspired by the human body and describe their work in its terms: the lip of a jug, the feet of a plate or the neck of a vase.

She uses the example of a mug to explain how the human body not only looks similar to a piece of pottery, but engages in a relationship with it.

"The mug has a body because it is a vessel, and a human being is a vessel that contains what it is [that] makes us human," Odundo says. "A mug will contain liquid that nourishes. And you need that nourishment to nourish your body."

This "natural, human quality" of pottery is what originally drew Odundo to the art form. She started off as a graphic designer in Kenya, but when she came to England in 1971, she ended up taking a foundational course in clay. She fell in love immediately.

"When I touched clay, I think there was a feeling of finding myself," she says. "How magical to be able to form a piece of work from the beginning to the end."

Odundo says that the inside of her pieces — the parts you can't see — define not only her pieces, but who she is as a person. The outside is just a "show" to the viewers or owners of the piece, much like how clothes and makeup function on a person. 

"The inside of the pieces for me have to be as carefully and tenderly made as the outside," she says of her work. "Without the inside, the outside has no meaning."

The full interview with Magdalene Odundo is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Magdalene Odundo produced by Ben Edwards.