The African continent, with widespread and rich traditions of women’s ceramics, nurtures creative activities in clay in the United Kingdom and the United States of America by inspiring artists of African origin and ancestry.

Titled “Diaspora,” to acknowledge the dispersion of peoples from their ancestral homelands, this section honors Magdelene Odundo and Helga Gamboa, artists resident in the UK, and Winnie Owens-Hart of the United States. Odundo and Gamboa, born and raised in Kenya and Angola respectively, were educated as artists in Britain.

As a young artist, Odundo initiated a personal journey through women’s ceramics which took her back to Africa and the Abuja Pottery Training Center in Nigeria, to her own people in Kenya and Uganda, and then to North America to meet Maria Martinez, the great Pueblo potter.  While the technique behind Odundo’s handbuilt vessels is basically African, her sphere of reference is global and synthetic.

Gamboa, who left war-torn Angola as a young woman, is rediscovering her country’s pre-colonial roots by her studies of native pottery traditions.  She first encountered these in anthropological photographs and written descriptions preserved in a small museum in the UK.  In her work, she combines traditional African handbuilding and burnishing with glazes referencing Angola’s colonial past, and embeds images of suffering and war.

Winnie Owens-Hart, an African-American artist, has worked in pottery villages in Nigeria and Ghana as she seeks to address in clay issues concerning women in both personal and global terms.