It’s been seven years in real time since my first contact with the extreme edge of Magdalene Odundo’s Untitled (1994). Seven years as perceived from the outside. In my perception, I am still there, poised at the event horizon of the burnished black hole of that pot and spaghettifying, stretching further and further, my feet planted in this wrong future where you see the rest of me. But really, my mind – my consciousness – is always there, at the rim, on the edge of understanding.

The cold spring of 2019 brought us both Odundo’s solo show, ‘The Journey of Things’, in the pigmented concrete of the Hepworth Wakefield, and the first composite images of a black hole. As Chanda Prescod-Weinstein writes in her new book The Edge of Space-Time, ‘As the 2020s unfold, we are in an era of what Dr. Delilah Gates refers to in her dissertation as “the era of precision black hole imaging.” Using the circumference of the Earth as the aperture for a radio telescope, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has for the first time delivered images of the event horizons of two supermassive black holes. The first, the black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 (M87), was revealed in April 2019.’ You might have the image of M87 in your mind’s eye, not least because it looks like our cultural images of the mind’s eye.

I am neither a practical maker, nor a theoretical physicist, and so I write this from a Lagrange point, a point of equilibrium between these two black holes of ignorance which lets me think with them both, through them both, to the edges of what it’s possible for me to know and experience. Odundo’s terracotta work Untitled (1994), burnished and carbonised, was the first work I experienced in the exhibition. It was one of the tallest pieces there, and a little bit like a heart with the aorta arising from it, a little bit like a gramophone, a little bit like a seedpod with its stem still attached, but large: half a metre high, its rim reaching towards you, O-ing around an open, roughly circular mouth that protrudes towards you on its bent gooseneck so that you cannot – however tall you are – look into the interior of the pot. You are held at the rim.

Among the objects that Odundo curated to surround her own works at the show, many but not all of them vessels, was a knife ring made in the 1960s by an unrecorded maker of the Pokot people, a Turkana community who live at the foot of the Cherang’any Hills in Kenya, west of the Rift Valley. The finger ring bears an outwards-facing blade twice its size that is associated both with ritual dances and with fights, where it’s specifically used for targeting eyes. Untitled (1994) welcomed me among a collection of water dippers and beakers, teapots and divination cups, but challenged me, extreme edge-first, to sharpen my gaze.

To look at an edge is to look at a boundary question, to ask where something begins and ends. Prescod-Weinstein asserts that ‘theoretical physics, and in particular theoretical cosmology, is a series of boundary-value problems’, a set of questions about how to define an edge and what happens there. The edge is where space-time happens. Odundo told the curator Andrew Bonacina, ‘I have been asked why I hand-builds [my pots], and the answer is that hand-building is a slower process than throwing on the wheel… I need the time to find the form I am looking for at the time of making.’ Odundo builds time into the space of her pots using a method derived from the Gbari tradition she learned during a two-month residency in Abuja, Nigeria, in the mid-1970s, where she was taught by female potters Ladi Kwali, Asibi Aidoo, Lami Toto and Kande Ushafa.

Rather than coil-building, Odundo’s method begins with a ball of clay that she hollows out and draws upwards, then burnishes with gourd scrapers, a technique learned from observing Maria Martinez and other Pueblo women potters, and achieving what Bonacina describes as a ‘luminous blackness’, a blackness that defies the pejorative lack and absence with which it is associated in Euro-Western culture. The luminosity of the pots, like the sharp edge, is achieved through the intense labour of scraping, which also compresses the clay to a greater density.

It’s the black hole’s massive density that causes the halo of light around M87: it’s not an emission from the black hole, but an optical illusion created by strong gravitational lensing. ‘Nothing’, Prescod-Weinstein reminds us, ‘not even light, can travel fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of the black hole. The event horizon appears to be a very hard edge to space-time’, but that edge also encourages us to imagine the black hole metaphorically as an object, when it is ‘rather a region in space-time’. Untitled also strikes my eyes as not an object, but rather a region, a locative co-ordinate that is almost palpable (never have the DO NOT TOUCH signs in a gallery been harder to obey); a reminder that ceramics are earth. They are air, water and fire, too, but their earth is earthed: mineralogically specific, traditionally the work of place made with the soil at hand.

Earth’s earth is now floating in space as ceramics, being good insulators with good thermal, chemical and mass stability, have been used to mitigate high temperatures in spacecraft since the Space Shuttle launch in 1981. Perhaps even more than the Voyager Golden Records, launched in 1977, it might be these little pieces of home – shaped by a complex process of combustion and one of the most ancient and durable art forms – that communicates to other sentient beings who we are, and from where we come. Octavia Butler’s duology Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), has come to be seen as prophetic of our current moment but emerged from her clear-eyed observation of Black history and white supremacy. In it, the protagonist Lauren Olamina advocates a religion she calls Earthseed, which argues for humans’ continued attempts at space travel, even as sustainable and functional life on Earth is collapsing, and to do so because God is Change.

writes Butler in Parable of the Sower, radically overthrowing a fixed Christian millenarian metaphysics in which God is order, hierarchy and oppressor. God, instead, is Clay. Ceramics are transformation as both physics and metaphysics, a spiritual practice of turning time into locative space, and space and place into something that endures through time.

‘Looking at the universe from its quantum margins allows us to see space-time – and all the philosophical questions associated with it – in new ways’, writes Prescod-Weinstein in The Edge of Space-Time. Odundo’s evocative, locative works are analogical of the edge of space-time, and also stand in the long history of scientific practice, both experimental and theoretical, that we call ceramics. Often dismissed because of its association with female practitioners, ceramics is placed on the edge of social acceptance in many cultures due to its association with the transformative and dangerous powers of fire. Seen as craft rather than art, and as premodern despite its spacefaring, ceramics is not just chemistry but also physics, and even – as the burnish shows – cosmology. Our Earth is a ball of earth, a clay ark carrying us through space. In Odundo’s hands, a ball of earth is compressed, drawn upwards, and burnished into a radiant halo of luminous blackness, the edge that meets but also demands our attention. It seeds a change in how we see.