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.