As the panoply of British summertime fixtures goes into full swing – just wrapped, 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 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.
described Odundo’s vessels as having a “quietly devastating .
