Dame Magdalene Odundo’s glittering thirty-year career has seen the ceramic artist become one of the most recognisable contemporary artists working with ceramics. Using traditional techniques to tell new stories about diasporic experiences, Odundo – who moved to the UK from Kenya in 1971 – has long engaged with a wide, intercultural range of influences and references, continuing to innovate within the ancient art form.

An expansive display of Odundo’s playful and poignant pieces, new and old, varying in scale and rich in expressions, will inhabit Houghton Hall’s grand, stately rooms this summer. Houghton Hall’s own political history – it was built for Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole – chimes with Odundo’s often politically-charged works, that are rooted in the shifting and challenging relationship we have with human bodies.

Look out for a new commission produced at the Wedgwood Factory, as well as Odundo’s spectacular installation of blown-glass vessels based on ancient Egyptian ear studs, Metamorphosis and Transformation (2011). Odundo’s works, brought into this opulent setting, propose a revelatory reimagining of the 18th century residence and its history, and position Odundo’s masterful oeuvre as an important landmark to match it.

The Chinese-British photographer Yan Wang Preston presents a new body of work that has been three years in the making for her second solo exhibition at Messums on Cork Street. Titled Three Easier Pieces, the exhibition sees the artist restage three iconic historical artworks in large-scale photographs: Manet’s Olympia; Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich and To Add a Metre to an Anonymous Mountain, a collaborative work organised by artist Zhang Huan. Wang Preston reimagines these works in thoughtful and provocative ways, reversing roles to ask questions about where we are in British society today when it comes to migrant and marginalised bodies.