Between Here and There, Then and Now

The ‘Embodying Anew’ exhibition at Maximillian William, 2021. All images courtesy of the gallery. 

 

reflecting on last year’s group exhibition ‘Embodying Anew’, its celebration of works from Magdalene Odundo, Simone Leigh and Thaddeus Mosley, and its poignant reminder of the ongoing legacy of African art

words Rochelle Roberts

 

You walk into the room and find it has been transformed into something resembling more of an altar or sacred space than an art gallery. You are confronted immediately with an L-shaped wooden table, three Magdalene Odundo vessels spaced along one side, a Simone Leigh sculpture of a woman’s head and neck sitting on the short side. There is a quietness to the way they stand together, an intensity to how they occupy the space. It is as if you have entered a church or old library, something palpable in the air. Those objects hold within them a kind of spiritualism, a feeling of ancestral presence moving through and around them. Then you turn and find a large, wooden sculpture by Thaddeus Mosley standing isolated at a distance, its bird-like form reaching out towards the table. What is immediately obvious is the way these five works seem to speak to each other, conversing in secret signs and pulses in a way that onlookers would not understand.

Odundo’s first sculpture Untitled from 1984 sits so that its open mouth appears to be addressing the group. Asymmetrical Reduced Black Piece (1992), with its curved neck, replies to Untitled, its lipped mouth open wide. The terracotta orange Untitled (2009), long neck stretched, throat open. Simone Leigh’s Stretch (GREEN) from 2020 looks across the room at Mosley’s Repetitive Reference (2015), as it gestures towards the others. They are a chorus of objects vibrating internally with musicality and intention. They sing in a kind of soundless harmony, a hymn in visual unison. 

It is believed in many African cultures, such as Yoruba and Zulu, that after a person dies, there is not an ending of life but rather a continuation, as the deceased depart for a new invisible world, the world of the ancestors. In that way, death is not seen as the end. There is a dialogue that comes with the journey between these two worlds, as the living perform rituals and ceremonies in order to appease their ancestors and ensure their continued protection. This is especially important in Odundo’s work; her vessels, able to both contain and un-contain because the emotion of taking and letting go are integral to the living and the dead. Her works are like an offering to her own ancestors, the open mouths providing a way to feed them in order to keep them content, so that they do not become angry and curse those who have displeased them.

Growing up, Odundo recalls her parents’ strong emphasis on keeping a person alive, even after they have died. You were thought of as bewitched if you spoke about someone as though they were dead because it was believed they were still there. The spirit of a person lingers on, an embodiment of the many memories and associations that are still held by the living who knew them. Ancestors, like ghosts, walking the earth in their perpetual in-between. They are felt in the air like an invisible presence, felt as you walk around the gallery space.

 

Magdalene Odundo. Left to right: Untitled, 1984. Asymmetrical Reduced Black Piece, 1992. Untitled, 2009.

 

Although Leigh’s Stretch (GREEN) is not a vessel with an opening, Leigh often creates figures with open crevices, such as No Face (cobalt) from 2015 which, like Stretch (GREEN), looks to be modelled on the head and elongated neck of a woman, except that her face is completely covered with blue twirls like small flowers, and in the middle a black hole to enter into. Many of Leigh’s vessels are reminiscent of the face jug pottery made by African-Americans enslaved in the South. Face jugs were believed to be powerful objects, providing spiritual protection. They are, like Odundo’s vessels and Mosley’s sculptures, a reference to ancestral life, the power spirits have over the living, and the performative and spiritual connection to sculpting within African art.   

‘Many of Leigh’s vessels are reminiscent of the face jug pottery made by African-Americans enslaved in the South. Face jugs were believed to be powerful objects, providing spiritual protection. They are, like Odundo’s vessels and Mosley’s sculptures, a reference to ancestral life’.

All three artists’ work have strong links to African tradition, despite the myriad of cultural and artistic influences that inform their work. Although Odundo started her artistic practice with a British education, through her travels she learned about traditional approaches to making. She began studying Graphic Design at Cambridge College before changing to Ceramics at the West Surrey College of Art and Design. After graduating from a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art in 1982, Odundo travelled to Nigeria and Kenya, studying at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre in Nigeria where she learned about Gwari pottery methods and techniques, such as hand-coiling pots rather than throwing them on a wheel.

Unglazed, the pots were fired, often multiple times, at high temperatures in order to achieve the rich depth of colour that is so indicative of Odundo’s own work. It is present in the deep, cosmic black of Asymmetrical Reduced Black Piece, the silvery stardust brushed across its underbelly, or in the dual coloration of Untitled (1984), the bleed of terracotta orange across the dark surface—a kind of visual improvisation. It is the quality of shape and gesture in these vessels that makes them so appealing, as well as the ways they allude to storytelling. They encourage the viewer to think about the person who might carry them, the functionality they hold in everyday life.

 

Magdalene Odundo. Asymmetrical Reduced Black Piece, 1992. 

 

There is something of the tactile quality of making with your hands, the arduous process of hand-coiling rather than throwing, which also links with the lives of the people who may use the pots—people who work with the earth, whose lives have been historically silenced and ignored. It is a quality which has a strong link with Leigh’s aims in creating her often monumental sculptures. She too uses her hands to build up a clay figure, one piece at a time. It is a method that is conceptually necessary to the realisation of her work. For her, sculpture is like a performance — performing “women’s work”, in a sense, but also performing the work of the “anonymous African potter”, who was often a woman. This sensibility directly echoes Odundo’s use of traditional African techniques in her making, and Mosely’s interest in African sculpture, but it is also a testament to Leigh’s ongoing work towards emphasising the importance of the Black woman in society today.

Born in Chicago, Leigh studied Fine Art and Philosophy at Earlham College in Indiana. Like Odundo, her education in ceramics was a traditional Western one. After interning at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, Leigh developed an engagement and interest in the objects associated with the African diaspora. Her work, which often entails extensive research, uses African iconography to engage with and celebrate the Black experience. In conversation with the artist and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich in 2020, Leigh spoke of having the Black woman in mind as a person for whom she is making the work to be viewed by. Many of her sculptures can be seen as representative of Black women–their broad noses, their afros and braids. And yet, they never have eyes; the stretch of skin where their sockets should be smoothed over.

 

Simone Leigh. Stretch (GREEN), 2020.

 

Stretch (GREEN) is no exception, with only the suggestion of the missing eyes in the slightly indented surface. It is not clear why Leigh’s women are eyeless. Is it because they themselves often go unnoticed? Or perhaps because they do not wish to see the world that still does not fully accept them? For me, it leaves the sculpture unidentified and anonymous (like so many African makers) but also speaks to the fact that her representations are universal—any Black woman can see themselves reflected in the sculpture, they are not any one person. Leigh’s work embodies a kind of experience or state of being, an emotion that can be felt in the very texture of their surfaces.

For Mosley, his interest in African art started before he even thought of becoming a sculptor. In the late 1940s, he was drawn to, and exhilarated by, the pure energy and inventiveness of the countless sculptural objects made by anonymous people as part of their daily lives. He was intrigued by the diversity of the work, how nothing was repetitive but each piece completely unique.

His attraction to the energy of African sculpture speaks to his ongoing engagement with jazz as a medium of inspiration and experimentation. This interest in jazz started early in Mosley’s life. Growing up in Pittsburgh, where his father was a coal miner and his mother a seamstress, both parents were musical, playing the trumpet and the piano respectively. His three sisters similarly shared the family love for music, forming a gospel group called ‘the Mosley Sisters’. The improvisation qualities of jazz are evident in Mosley’s technique and his approach to sculpting. He does not plan a piece ahead of time, does not sketch it first to work out its shape and texture. Instead, he uses his hammer and chisel as his drawing materials, letting energy flow from him to determine the form, rhythm and surface—a sculptural improvisation.  

As his practice developed, so too did the idea of his sculptures as animated abstraction, a way to emphasise work as a feeling rather than as an object that is representational of one concrete thing. This is evident in Repetitive Reference, the way the piece is both bird-like and yet strangely human. The large, curved pieces of wood that could be seen as wings could equally be interpreted as arms waving above a head, hands like flat spades. I imagine the sculpture as an embodied dancer, moving automatically to the syncopated jazz that inevitably plays in the background. Although the sculpture has clean, elegant lines, the precariousness of the way it leans at angles, the way it holds itself in space, speaks to Mosley’s continued interest in jazz as inspiration for art and his ability to create the feel of movement in a static object.

 

Thaddeus Mosley. Repetitive Reference, 2015.

 

This unfixed quality of form, the ability to be two things at once, is something carried by both Odundo and Leigh’s sculptures too. For Odundo, the vessel as body is something integral to her practice. Each one constructed with its own personality, and yet it is obvious when looking at the breadth of her work that—despite the fact she often works in series—they all connected to each other. It is as if Odundo has built up a conversation or a piece of music, each new series of sculptures building up and adding a new layer to the ensemble. Leigh often draws parallels between the body of Black women and architecture, creating large domed structures topped with the upper body of a woman that reference African dwellings, such as sub-Saharan grass huts and rural meeting places which were often built by women.    

It is the in-between state that holds these artists together, a common thread that I am drawn to because of the way they seem to exist in dual timeframes and locations—akin to ancient African art and yet very contemporary with Western appeal. The sculptures reference and complement each other, a synergy of form and gesture. You look and notice how Untitled (2009) echoes Stretch (GREEN); the long neck, the rounded body/rounded head, as though they are the reverse of each other. You pick up on the arch of Asymmetrical Reduced Black Piece when you look at the curves in Repetitive Reference. Perhaps it is because they are all indicative of bodily forms, a repetition in different materials and shapes. They are a testament to the long history of African art, a celebration of Blackness and of the ongoing legacy of artistic tradition and expression.

'Embodying Anew' was held at Maximillian William 6 May - 19 June, 2021.


PROFILE

Rochelle Roberts is a writer and editor from London. Her work has been published by Ache, Art of Choice, Lucy Writers Platform and Common Threads Press, amongst others.