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.
