- Venue
- Edinburgh Printmakers
- Location
William Kentridge works with black and white: he draws in charcoal and makes etchings and lithographs. Through these media he explores the black and the white and all the shades of grey which compose our lives.
William Kentridge has studied theatre and worked in acting, mime, theatre production and set design. His drawings reflect all the skill and learning from these fields of activity and show an artistic intelligence at work, harnessing both intuitive and conscious thought to the service of subject matter. The exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers shows several series of etchings and includes a 50 minute video documentary in which he discusses the animated films he has developed from his drawing.
William Kentridge is a deeply political artist: the etchings and the animations are concerned with the interaction of the individual and society, in this case South African society. But he is not a polemic artist. His interest is in our own innermost thoughts and our fragile connections to the outside world and to other people. This process is, to our inner selves, an ‘imaginary' process.
He traces the ways in which we think, how we visualize our lives and how this process is always at work ‘in the back of our minds'. In his films we follow the thoughts of his characters and literally see their connections to other people. As when his capitalistic business man sits up in bed with a breakfast tray. He is thinking of his goldmine and as he presses the plunger of his coffee pot we follow his thoughts and descend down through the mineshaft: but what we see are the lives of the goldminers, the hidden strata of other lives not usually visible to us, the other lives on which we build our world.
Any drawing is to some extent narrative: it is the story the author tells to him/herself made visible. William Kentridge makes animated films from his charcoal drawings by erasing and re-drawing the movement on a single sheet of paper, taking a photograph, a ‘frame' of the film, before each erasure. Because each frame of a William Kentridge film carries the marks of erasures from previous frames the narrative becomes embedded in our memory and the emotional content builds through the expressive quality of the drawing. The animations are accompanied by a sound track. Never speech, but music or ambient sounds which intensify the mood of the drawing or elaborate on the subject matter. He has developed a set of characters, such as the capitalist mentioned above, which recur in both his printmaking and his animations. He does not generally employ a model but uses his own body as his reference. His body inhabits his work, and we sense this in the physicality of pose and the fleshiness of the drawn or etched characters. This can be seen in the series of etchings ‘Ubu tells the Truth' on view in the gallery. This is drawing with purpose, thought, meaning and emotion.
