Notes

The following excerpt is taken from Art in America, January 1999:

William Kentridge: Ghosts and Erasures by Leah Ollman

The fluidity and contingency of drawing lie at the heart of all of Kentridge's art of the past 20 years, not just his work on paper. In the films, however, an unusual, reciprocal dynamic comes into play between the drawings that comprise the visual fabric of the films and the films themselves. Unlike conventional cell animation, which fuses thousands of drawings into a slick, seamlessly continuous whole, Kentridge's process is overtly raw and hand-wrought. For each film (all are under 10 minutes) Kentridge makes about 20 drawings, which undergo continual addition, permutation and erasure, the traces of which are plainly visible, yielding an impression of time and space as viscous, invariably altered by every arrival and departure. 'You could look at the drawings as indicative of the process and the route to making the film,' he says. 'You can also see the finished film as the complicated way of arriving at that particular suite of drawings.

This work was a preliminary work for the production of Woycek on the Highveld, a collaboration between Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company.