Loewe Hosted Kit Connor, Naomi Ackie and Lesley Manville at an Art-Filled Country House Retreat
As the panoply of British summertime fixtures goes into full swing – Glastonbury just wrapped, Wimbledon starts today – Jonathan Anderson slipped in a rare one-off invitation to a country house weekend in Norfolk. An enthusiastic pack of art-and-craft appreciating friends of Loewe drew up at the spectacular 18th-century Houghton Hall – past the sweeping park and the herd of white deer – to join Anderson’s introduction to Dame Magdalene Odundo and her exhibition in the house.
She is his greatest ceramicist hero. “I adore her,” he said. “For me, there’s something in her work which is so personal, physical. There’s a body aspect to them.” The exhibition is a trail of Odundo’s works from 1990 to the present, significantly placed amongst the lofty salons and ornate bedrooms of the Palladian stately home built for Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s Prime Minister in the 1720s. She’s the first Black, and the first female contemporary artist to have been invited to respond to the house by Walpole’s descendant, David Cholmondeley, the 7th Marquess, and his wife Rose – members of a new band of British aristocrats who are opening up their estates to edgy art projects, to be on public view.
Amongst the ornate grandeur of the state rooms and bedrooms, hung in with priceless tapestries and embroideries of gambolling classical Arcadian subjects and vast likenesses of Stuart kings and queens, her work is arresting at every turn. The Guardian described Odundo’s vessels as having a “quietly devastating defiance”. Odundo described her critical aim slightly differently, as she showed the agog audience of actors and artists through. “I wanted a disruptive but comfortable synergy with the life that has been lived in here,” she said. “I hope things look as if they belong here.”
That – at first sight – is certainly true of the towering 160cm-high Wedgwood wedding cake of a structure that sits in the centre of a dining table, for all the world like a decadent heirloom conversation-piece wheeled out for a 19th-century ball. Look closer, and the “cake” has layers of images silhouetted in jasperware: rising upwards from brutal shackles, to patterns of slave galleys, and upwards to contemporary scenes of the young protest movement which is ongoing in Kenya.
“It’s one of the few narrative pieces I’ve made,” Odundo says of her collaboration with artisans at Wedgwood. “It combines the history of this house, [and] who owned what during the transatlantic slave trade. Where we are placed. How we find ourselves where we are today – in terms of the global ‘we’. I wanted to dig into the history of this building, and into my own history growing up in Kenya. [We had] quite a tough time in a semi-apartheid colonial system, until Kenya gained independence in 1963.” Sir Robert Walpole invested in the South Sea Company, which profited from the proceeds of the British slave trade. Odundo also said she’d uncovered Cholmondeley relatives among the Delameres, colonial settlers in Kenya. But the Wedgwood piece also enshrines her reverence for the ceramics magnate Josiah Wedgwood, the “hugely humanitarian” campaigner for the abolition of slavery.
Odundo’s 40-year practice in ceramics began when she came from Kenya to study in the UK in 1971. That Anderson arranged for the Loewe Foundation to sponsor the exhibition is a patronage of true fandom. His relationship with the artist, whom he laughingly addressed before dinner as “my Beyoncé, my superstar!”, tracks back to 2017, when he put her burnished, sculptural vessels into conversation with fashion silhouettes in Disobedient Bodies, the exhibition he curated at The Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire (he also collects her work). The admiration is mutual. “I like the way Jonathan uses cloth, fashion and textiles to blur the lines between craft and art,” said Odundo, as guests were frolicking on the sundrenched lawns at Houghton. “And that’s important to me, as someone who’s distilling movement into a static situation. It’s like having a dancer, a ballerina, an acrobat… and arresting their movement in ceramics. It’s the idea that the work breathes.”
