Notes

Big Tree, the pioneering piece in the Universal Archive series, was a collaborative effort between William Kentridge and the David Krut Workshop team. Departing from traditional methods, they carved the image into linoleum plates sized to match Encyclopedia pages, allowing for layered printing. Each aspect, including the angle of the pages, was meticulously planned to evoke fluidity and motion. A crucial moment occurred when Kentridge decided to diagonally crop one sheet, enhancing the artwork’s dynamism. Master Printer, Jillian Ross hailed this adjustment as magical, completing the work with a sense of movement.¹

In an Oxford lecture in 2013 Kentridge refers to the process: ‘The over determined branch: This is how the tree breaks. […] For the last year I have been drawing trees. […] I had Chinese brushes which hold their point for a while and then change, and the point splays out and makes a group of imprecise marks, rather than the clear calligraphic mark of the good brush. The bad brush suggests the plethora and the ordered randomness of leaves, or the feathery twigs at the end of a branch. There was a memory of some trees I had drawn in some charcoal landscapes in which I had been dissatisfied with the transformation of charcoal into foliage. Here was a chance to rescue those trees. The trees are grown. Pages of the encyclopaedia with trunks, with secondary branches, foliage, grass, shadows, sunlight on a trunk are collated and collaged to make the trees. The tree can find its form. Pages can be more or less overlapped, other pages added to change the shape.’²

^1. David Krut Projects (no date) Universal Archive (Big Tree), online, https://davidkrutprojects. com/artworks/21085/universal-archive-big-tree, accessed 31 May 2024.
^2. William Kentridge, lecture notes from Humanitas Professorship, Oxford, May 2013.

Provenance

David Krut Workshop, Johannesburg.

Private Collection.