Standing proudly in the middle of a room of 18th- and 19th-century English heritage portrait paintings at Houghton Hall is a burnished terracotta vessel. The work, by Magdalene Odundo, stuns by its simplicity. As the bygone residents of the Palladian mansion depicted in the paintings gaze down superciliously, Odundo’s Untitled (2024) – a self-portrait, but also a portrait of humanity – commands a different kind of power. Its form captures an ancient human history and artistry, using the age-old terra sigillata technique, where the forms aren’t glazed but are coated with a slip made from diluted clay. The vessel’s form also represents a necessity, to carry and to transport, that endures. A single, protruding nub in the side of the piece – evoking a nose, or a nipple, a signature of Odundo – anthropomorphises the ceramic object. But it’s what inside that completes it – the part we can’t see.
Odundo has dealt with the global history of looking and our relationship with objects, using ceramics and glass to allude to human bodies, for more than 40 years. She is the first Black artist, and the first woman, to be exhibited at Houghton Hall, and her approach is telling. Rather than vie with the lavish, Italianate William Kent-designed interiors of the state rooms, or intervene in its history, she has taken a different approach, rarely seen in these kind of contemporary exhibitions at heritage homes; she has tried to blend in, to assimilate her own history with the one that is so pristinely preserved here.
At times, she slips seamlessly into the spaces. A wheel-thrown, white clay tea set, with delicate leaf curlicues inspired by Victorian gardenware, sits unassumingly on a console in the white drawing room. If you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t know it hadn’t always been there – yet Odundo made the piece to commemorate the millennium in 2000. On a lacquered bedside commode next to William Kent’s shell bed in the green velvet bedchamber, Odundo has replaced one of a pair of cranes with a colourful crane from her own archive – Untitled, (1995). The bird is a powerful symbol for the bedroom, as they are monogamous for life. It is also a cosmopolitan bird, they can be found throughout most continents in the world, and are common in east Africa, where Odundo grew up.
Elsewhere, in the austere, utilitarian stone hall, conceived by Colen Campbell, Odundo has installed two vessels from her Kigango series, made in homage to the sculpted wooden columns of the Mijikenda people in Kenya. They inhabit two niches originally intended to house lifesize figurative sculptures on either side of the hall – but this aspect of the design was never completed. Quietly, subtly, but with a perforating sense of purpose, Odundo claims that space. Meanwhile, a grand group of anthropomorphic vessels congregate in the centre of the hall, some iridescent, gleaming blacks (achieved by an oxygen-deprived firing process, and the addition of wood chips to create smoke) and earthy, warm orange hues (burnished and fired in a gas kiln). They suggest what kind of bodies have passed through this space – and what kind of bodies might have been absent, and still are.
In other rooms it is harder to glide through the corridors of wealth and power so easily – as a visitor, or as a contemporary artwork. The unsavoury aspects of a place like Houghton Hall – built on land inherited by the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, possible in part thanks to profits from selling shares in the South Sea Company – comes to the surface in the marble parlour. It is left to Odundo to say, through an astonishing new work, what many may already feel walking around Houghton Hall.
A pair of metal pineapples once stood in the centre of the dining table – a place where elaborate feasts would once have taken place. A version of the pineapple’s history here is also depicted in a Danckerts painting, in which the royal gardener presents what it said to be the first British-grown fruit to Charles II. In the 18th century, pineapples were a symbol of the exotic, a signifier of luxury and wealth, brought to the country as a result of colonialism. “We used to kick them about as footballs in Kenya,” Odundo jokes.
She has staged a different talking point on colonialism and slavery in the middle of this now empty table, surrounded by portraits of imperious white men. Odundo’s first ever narrative piece – clearly, the context called for it – is starkly different to her usually abstract shapes and surfaces. Made during a year-long collaboration with Wedgwood, using Jasperware and historic moulds from the Wedgwood collection, the new piece resembles a towering, tiered wedding cake. When you get closer the celebratory tenor quickly shifts. At the base, are representations of manacles, shackles and muzzles, used to brutally dehumanise and enslave; a second layer reproduces the drawing of black figures on the Brookes ship, published in 1788 – an image that galvanised the abolitionist movement. A further layer draws on news images from protests against tax rises in Nairobi in 2023. Also depicted are portraits of Josiah Wedgwood, an abolitionist and campaigner who designed the anti-slavery medallion, and Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved man who became an influential figure in the abolitionist movement, who corresponded with Wedgwood.
Still, the piece speaks in silence to a silent room of historic portraits and hushed visitors who are kept back behind a rope – so as not to disturb history. This work is also about distance, about the gap between acknowledgment and reparation, knowing and understanding. It questions ideas of legacy and power, and the politics of art patronage intertwined within it. The work’s title (cribbed from WB Yeats’s poem about injustice and progress, The Second Coming) is “the falcon cannot hear the falconer”. At the very top, tiny though triumphant, is a Kenyan female protester, her hand raised in a gesture of power and defiance. Odundo herself, perhaps – or any survivor of the unrelinquishing cycles of violence and brutality.
