The Journey Of Things

The Journey of Things by Magdalene Odundo has been published alongside the exhibition of the same name presented at The Hepworth Wakefield in Spring 2019. The book features 44 of Odundo’s vessels alongside a large selection of museological and contemporary objects that reveal the wide range of global references that have informed her practice. The book object comprises a series of interleaved sections presenting an organic flow of content which pairs and juxtaposes the historic and the contemporary, featuring works by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Lucie Rie, Jean Arp, as well as ancient vessels from Greece and Egypt, historic ceramics from Africa, Asia and Central America, and ritual objects from across the African continent.

Considered one of the premier ceramicists working today, Magdalene A. N. Odundo DBE, born in Kenya, produces ceramic objects whose beauty emanates from their voluptuous forms and shimmering surfaces. Hand- coiled and scraped smooth with a gourd, Odundo’s objects are laboriously produced. After the clay is shaped, it is covered with slip, fired, and then burnished by hand. The object’s color is determined by the firing technique: a first firing in an oxidizing atmosphere turns it red-orange while a second firing in an oxygen-poor atmosphere causes the clay to turn black.