Magdalene Odundo has made some of the greatest pots of our time. In this episode of Design Emergency, she talks to our cofounder, Alice Rawsthorn, about how she discovered the joys and challenges of making ceramics and their symbolic value in expressing our cultural identities.

Born in Kenya in 1950, Magdalene spent her childhood there and in India before moving to the UK to study art in Cambridge, where she flung herself into student debates on identity politics. She then studied at what is now the University for the Creative Arts in the Surrey market town of Farnham and at the Royal College of Art in London. As well as being formally beautiful, Magdalene’s pots are rooted in her love of making and her understanding of the politics of her own identity, as Black African woman living in Europe, and her years of research into the ancient ceramic traditions of Africa, Asia and Central America.

Magdalene tells Alice how she draws on that research to reinterpret historic forms, finishes and firing processes in her pots that evoke the drama and fragility of dance. Her ceramics belong to the collections of major museums, including the British Museum and V&A in London, the Art Institute of Chicago and The Met in New York. Yet she still lives and works in the same place in Farnham, where, after years of dedicated teaching, she has become Chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts.

Thank you for joining us. You can find images of Magdalene and her work on our Instagram grid @design.emergency. And you can tune into this episode of Design Emergency and others on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and other podcast platforms. Please join us for future episodes when we will hear from other global leaders in different areas of design.

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Design Emergency is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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