MAGDALENE ODUNDO TRI-PART-IT-US
THE ONE AND THE MANY MARTINA MARGETTS
Magdalene Odundo is a ceramic artist who works on her own but who for the past three years has worked collaboratively in glass. Her personal journey describes an individual experience of everyday life which has been grounded in Africa and has spanned continents. Odundo has created sculptural installations from individual components which find their resonance and meaning as a collective group. In each case, the one and the many contribute to the insight that the condition of humanity is to be individual but to exist and find meaning together. Plato’s third Dialogue, Parmenides, proposed that whilst there is unity in form – an object, a human being – there is variety in their sense and sensibilities. Odundo’s works, culturally resonant and deep-rooted, are an evocation of the theme of the one and the many. This exhibition, collectively entitled Tri-part-it-us, encompasses three projects created over three years. The making of glass installations is necessarily collaborative and since 2011 Odundo has chosen to engage intensively with this process. James Maskrey, the master glassblower at National Glass Centre, is intrinsic to this narrative because he has assisted Odundo as maker and technical adviser since 2010: first at North Lands Creative Glass in Scotland, then at National Glass Centre for Transition I in 2012, first exhibited there in Kith & Kin II, and since 2013 on the ambitious new 1000-piece commission, Transition II. It is crucial for Odundo that this exhibition unites all the projects, so that the accruing narrative of the constituent parts can be appreciated as what she terms, ‘a cycle of thinking, production and translation’. It is ‘a translation of languages, from non-Western to Western communication, from clay to glass’. In discussing the works, she first alludes to Metamorphosis and Transformation, created in 2011 by invitation of the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, USA, where Odundo worked with their head glassmaker Benjamin Cobb and team. At each stage, Odundo has intertwined biographical memory with craft practice, which she summarises like a poetic incantation: ‘The Tacoma works are formless, embryonic, clear glass. Varied shapes from nine to seventy-nine centimetres. Thirty seven pieces in the group and all different. Some with folded lines, some rippled lines, some regular vertical indents like a plant or fruit; some with striations like a scarified skin. Bent shapes. Torsos. A child body; a cradled shape. Clear glass, a statement of one kind of clarity. A few with colour.’ While Metamorphosis and Transformation embraces bright colours, for their familial recognition of pleasure and appealing stimulation, the use of colour in Transition II represents a dramatic shift. It becomes clear that colour, like form, is particularly controlled in Odundo’s language of composition, a Minimalist’s deployment so that, like ‘colour’ in music, it can be deliberately restrained. Of the 1000 pieces in the total installation, fewer than a dozen break the monochrome. Hence another incantation: ‘This National Glass Centre project is different. The group is serious. Regimented. A group marching across the space. In unison, but individual. Conformity. Ceremonial. Ritual. China/East Africa. A complete change of tone and intent and experience.’
Image: TRANSITION II, (detail) 2014 | 05
THE ONE AND THE MANY
It is sixty-four years since Odundo was born in Kenya. Reflection on its troubled history of displacement and threats to the traditional way of life are leitmotifs of her creative purpose. The concept of the one and the many relates also to the flow of history and of culture. The seeds of creativity and growth of understanding lie in some of the most ancient works. For Odundo, an encounter with a 3500-year old tiny glass bead ear stud from ancient Egypt, in the ethnographic collection of London’s Petrie Museum, planted the idea from which all her projects in glass have evolved. Inspired by the implicit closeness of an ear stud to the body, articulating and expressing the body’s physical presence, the form of the components of each installation appears like a body in embryo. The forms appear to be both coming alive but are also hauntingly inanimate, as if representing not growth but arrested development, or seizure, or death. Like the ear stud, the swirling lines achieved by the filigrana glass technique are embedded in the form as if a cradled embrace; or a trapping net. But whilst the ancient ear stud connoted beauty – what potter Edmund de Waal writing of netsuke called ‘a small, tough explosion of exactitude’1 – modern glass can be mundane in its quotidian ubiquity. Since glass literally shapes our perception of space and place in the urban and domestic fabric of life, its ordinariness is absorbed without conscious mediation and critique. Odundo equates this response to glass to our perception of water – fluid, reflective, remarkable yet generally taken for granted. And yet for Odundo both water and glass have a powerful significance in their physical and symbolic association with ‘flow’. As she realised: ‘Everywhere I have worked with glass’ – Tacoma, North Lands, National Glass Centre – ‘has had water around’. This fluidity has been transposed not just into the glassblowing process but into the material composition and installation, so that light and shadow articulate a complex interaction with the objects themselves. And those incisive black lines in clear glass might indeed be waves of water, as graphically rhythmic as a Hokusai woodcut. Odundo challenges the apparent ‘nothingness’ of glass. She positions glass in the mainstream of contemporary art installation practice to create a dialogue between material and meaning which is inflected by the special qualities of the discipline. The recent past in art history has supplied other key examples where large installations about aspects of globalised humanity and diaspora are dependent for their effect on being handmade in a particular material. Taking clay as an example, Ai Weiwei’s 100 million Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern in 2010, the several versions of Antony Gormley’s Field on different continents since 1992 and Edmund de Waal’s Atemwende at the Gagosian Gallery, New York in 2013 each contains a narrative of peoples whose lives are shaped by ideology or belief - the Chinese, the Jews – or by more generic human and environmental experience. For such artists, as for Odundo, synthesising thought about people, space, time and memory provides a metaphor of growth, not just of the work of art but of origins, understanding and acceptance. As John Dewey divined in his seminal lectures on Experience and Education in the 1930s: ‘Growth, or growing as developing, not only physically but intellectually and morally, is one exemplification of the principle of continuity’.2 Odundo’s frequent mention of ‘a journey’ is a layering of these several journeys as an artist and human being.
06 | Image: ANCIENT EGYPTIAN GLASS EAR STUD, Petrie Museum, University College London
MARTINA MARGETTS
Whilst the growth of form in Odundo’s ceramic practice is intimate and painstakingly slow, with the large-scale glass blown projects it is a dynamic collaborative process. At National Glass Centre, the production and installation of Tri-part-it-us are brought together by James Bustard, Director, Julia Stephenson, Head of Arts, and Maskrey, who led the making of Transition II with his team, alongside Berengo Studio in Murano and Devereux and Huskie Glassworks in Wiltshire. Independent architect and Odundo’s studio assistant, Patricia Mato-Mora, used the Rhino visualiser to articulate Transition II in virtual three dimensions and calculate the hanging. ‘My demands on people are very exacting’, Odundo conceded, but I also observed the network of mutual respect. National Glass Centre is embedded in Sunderland University’s international teaching, research and production capabilities and is also a major commissioner and manager of glass projects, rehabilitating Sunderland’s heritage as a productive centre of glassmaking in the UK. Two students, Emma Baker and Erin Barr, could therefore participate as assistant makers, which appealed to Odundo’s own pedagogic commitment to teaching and research as a professor at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham. For Transition II, every step of making is calibrated amongst Maskrey’s team and alchemically resolved into the final shape. Careful preparation and numerous skills are involved. For example, the thousands of black canes, which form the pattern, each take twenty minutes to create. Each cane is made by hand by Maskrey, pulling out a lump of glass to halfway across the studio, starting with a colour, adding a few layers of clear glass, heating it through. The process is hot and dangerous, judging what you can stretch without breaking, then overseeing the annealing process which requires at least twenty-four hours to bring the red-hot work back down to room temperature without stress and cracking. Once the action of making starts it cannot stop, like surgery, or theatre, or dance. The hot glass furnace environment has a primordial intensity, as Maskrey says: ‘If there’s any noise in the hot shop, you’ re not doing it right’. Watching the creation of one of the 1000 pieces for Transition II over half an hour is to witness an intense concentration and focus in the moment, the product of embodied knowledge, experience and skill which articulates the unspoken language of visual art. In this site of production, Maskrey channelled the rigorous expectation of Odundo’s concept in his head: ‘Even when she’s not here, she’s talking to me.’ In the hanging of Transition II, Odundo relates that ‘a lot of human eye was required to fit in what worked with each other’ as the character of the handmade inflects the one and the many of the total work of art. The installation is ‘crafted in the spirit of diligence’ which is vital to all Odundo’s work. The resulting spatial rhythms are a complex fusion of the geometric and organic, just like nature and music. This is deliberate in each project of Tri-part-it-us. At the start of the Tacoma project in 2011, resonant in Odundo’s mind were the shape and decoration of the ancient Egyptian ear stud and the rhythms of the peoples of the Nile valleys. For Transition II, its formal allusion to notation on a stave of music suggests her work ‘comes from my despair that I cannot play an instrument’. All three projects together in the exhibition collectively propose a musical composition
Image: ANCIENT EGYPTIAN GLASS EAR STUD, Petrie Museum, University College London | 07
THE ONE AND THE MANY
of harmony and counterpoint, shapes swelling and receding, massing and separating, a crescendo and a repose. In terms of arresting effect and patterning, there are echoes of works Odundo carries in her creative memory, such as Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter and Bridget Riley’s op-art paintings and prints. Such works, as well as Odundo’s, turn on a relationship between illusion and reality. When we look at a work of art, what does it represent, what do we perceive? And is the process of apprehension any more transparent in ‘reality’? When the Italian writer Italo Calvino died, Gore Vidal wrote of his novelised character Mr Palomar: ‘He is trying to figure out the nature of waves. Is it possible to follow just one? Or do they all become one? E pluribus unum and its reverse might well sum up Calvino’s approach to our condition. Are we a part of the universe? Or is the universe, simply, us thinking that there is such a thing?’3 A topography of the real, the natural, the manmade and inner thought - memory, feeling and imagination - shape our character and universe. But while Transition II is expansive, there is also tension in the suspended glasswork literally hanging by a thread. This tension is also present in the process of glassblowing and in the intent of the 1000 elements, as Odundo explains: ‘The human mass, what is our human capacity? I was thinking: what if you confine people in an emergency, what is the maximum you can fit in after which people collapse? I was trying to work out in my mind how many people you can get into a bunker. If you grew up under colonialism, you can smell the confinement, the cells, the camps, the stampede, the dark and light of our near past history; you can imagine the dance with life and death’.
MARTINA MARGETTS
The role of objects to speak eloquently on our behalf – and to start conversations – are roles Odundo embraces. Tri-part-it-us celebrates a flow of making and thinking. The ebb and flow of peoples and their land is a current affair for all, exemplified by Odundo’s reflection on one river: ‘The River Nile elicits debate and conversation - the Egyptians consider it as their birthright, but who owns the Nile? Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya or perhaps Tanzania? Are they three rivers, the White, Blue and the Nile or just the Nile?’ The flow of objects’ significance from one to another, from one era to another, one people to another is the narrative of Tri-part-it-us, with the Egyptian ear stud as catalyst: ‘While working with it I have sought to understand the contemporary lie of the land and its people, my people. We are objects and objects speak of our humanity’. For Odundo, her working life has involved the interplay of the container and the contained: the vessel form as representation of human thought and being. In the dramatic space of Transition II Odundo likens the encounter to being in a crypt or a cave, a crowded market or ghetto. Nevertheless, at the first public viewing Odundo watches individual people amongst the 1000 tactile elements and would like them to feel ‘imbued with a human embrace’. As audience and installation unify the theme of the one and the many, Odundo concludes: ‘in that space it’s close to people. They can’t actually touch it, but most people will have felt it. It is work that speaks to me and I hope it speaks to others’.
Odundo balances public and private in both her working process and her thoughts about community and the individual. These past three years of glass projects have been a public, collaborative period of creativity in contrast to her private production of ceramics; and it has been a period of overt articulation of the abject experience of people who still hope for escape to a better life. ‘For me’, Odundo reflects, ‘this has been a public exploration of all the things I feel and experience daily…you see people crowded on boats trying to escape, trying to find refuge, so the work does have that essence of mass confinement to it, yet at the same time there are areas in the work where you can go in and explore privately’. This possibility of unifying public and private thought through things resonates amongst commentators from both arts and sciences: In November 2014, the Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, spoke about the lifesize bronze sculpture by Ernst Barlach (the hovering angel Der Schwebende) which symbolically unites German people in their wish to express ‘reflection and regret’ about the past. ‘The object has a task to perform’, he said.4 ‘Imagine a world without things’, writes the science historian Lorraine Daston. ‘There would be nothing to describe, nothing to explain, remark, interpret, or complain about. Without things, we would stop speaking; we would become as mute as things are alleged to be’.5
08 | Image: TRANSITION II, (detail) 2014
NOTES 1. De Waal, Edmund, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, Chatto and Windus, 2010 hardback edition, p16 2. Dewey, John, Experience and Education, 1938, reprinted Pocket Books, London 1997, p36 3. Gore, Vidal, Calvino’s Death, New York Review of Books, 21st November 1985 4. Neil MacGregor lecture on Germany: Memories of Nation, 10th November 2014, Emmanuel Centre, London, accompanying his eponymous book and the British Museum exhibition 5. Daston, Lorraine (ed) introduction to Things That Talk: Object Lessons From Art and Science, MIT Press, paperback edition 2007
Image: TRANSITION II, (detail) 2014 | 09
30 | TRANSITION II
44 | TRANSITION II | James Maskrey, Magdalene Odundo and Amber King making the units for Transition II at National Glass Centre
46 | TRANSITION II | Installation of Transition II at National Glass Centre
TRI-PART-IT-US MAGDALENE ODUNDO October 2014 - March 2015 National Glass Centre at the University of Sunderland, Liberty Way, Sunderland SR6 0GL +44 (0) 191 515 5555 / www.nationalglasscentre.com 2015 © artist and authors All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced or stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted, in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data / A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-906832-21-6 Photograhy: © Gilmar Ribeiro apart from pgs 42–45 © Colin Davison Editor: Julia Stephenson Design: Joanna Deans Print: Die Keure, Brugge First published in 2015 by Art Editions North Art Editions North is an imprint of the University of Sunderland Distributed by Corner House Publications 70 Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5NH, England tel: +44 (0) 161 200 1503 / fax: +44 (0) 161 200 1504 email: Publications@cornerhouse.org www.cornerhouse.org/publications