I describe myself as an artist living in Johannesburg, who makes drawings and
sometimes the drawings are filmed and become animated films.
Sometimes there are performers in front of the animated film and they become theatre or opera.
So it becomes a drawing in four dimensions. In space and extending over time.
The studio here is both a vital physical and psychic space.
In a way you can think of it
as a kind of expansion of one's head. Where instead of a synapse or a thought
travelling three centimeters from one part of the brain to another, it's the
eight metres walk across the studio from one drawing to another image.
Filling the studio of all the stages of a project as it happens, the ink, the
charcoal, the page, the previous drawings physically there,
is a vital part.
This is the studio. The garden studio. There's a larger studio in town
where the workshops happen. Where sculpture is made. But this is where
animation, the drawing, the editing happens.
I guess it all starts from
charcoal drawings.
You can change charcoal as quickly as you can change your mind. One can take a
drawing and with one brush it just disappears.
So there's a flexibility in it. As well as a kind of granularity that I really like.
You know the brushes when you get them keep a good point, so you
can work quite accurately and as they get more use they become more
recalcitrant and don't keep their shape. So there's a kind of different, different
ways of drawing with either the good or the bad brush.
Like the charcoal, it's very adjustable.
It's adjustable not by rubbing it up. By sticking other sheets over.
It's kind of got a speed that one can [...]
I had two lives as an artist. One after University, when I made etchings and
taught at an art school and had an exhibition. And then I decided I didn't
have the right to be an artist. I had nothing to say. I tried to become an actor.
Failed at that. Tried to become a filmmaker. Failed at that and discovered
almost in spite of myself that I was back in the studio making drawings and
that's when I suppose, a year or so after that, I could finally write on a visa
application form, occupation artist.
There has to be an initial impulse. Which might be an image.
It might be a phrase and it has to be enough to get the first
drawing done. Then the hope is that in the physical activity of making the drawings,
new ideas emerge and possibilities are seen which then start to direct it and
then after a while you start saying, 'Well what does it start to add up to?
What are the kind of concerns that are coming out in the work?' and that becomes the shape.
The idea of being an artist is that all the different mediums are open to you in
which to explore the world. Which is to say to explore your relationship to the
world as an artist.
I don't negate my position as an artist.
It's both an inside and outside position. It's both an insider as a child of
privilege, of being white middle-class South African, who's had the first 40
years of my life under apartheid and the last 20 years in the period since first
democratic elections.
So aware of those contradictions, that's the position from
which the art has always been made.
Where a sort of a self awareness is deeply built
into the process.
I think there's an important polemical and political
role in art. In defending the uncertain. In having critique of all forms of
certainty. Whether it's on authoritarian politics or certainty of knowledge.
Of making ambiguity and contradiction. It's central lifeblood.
Showing that these are
not just mistakes at the edge of understanding but the way in which our
understanding is constructed. Of making us aware of constructing meaning rather
than receiving information. These are all things that are natural to art and
they're all our kind of models of how understanding the world could be.
The studio in town is a larger machine. That's where we make the sculptures.
Where we film workshops. Where we do rehearsals. So it has a different kind of
functioning. So a lot of things are filmed there and then brought back here
and we look at them on a much smaller scale in the model.
It's not that I've chosen to base myself. I've chosen to never leave where I am.
Where I have been based and where I come from.
There were many times when it seemed both possible
sometimes when it seemed a good idea to not be in this madness of the South
African political Maelstrom.
But fundamentally I've understood that the
work and the connection to the people here and to the politics and the world,
is fundamental to me. To the work. Even if the work isn't about that. Even if it's
painting a landscape or drawing the landscape or an ink drawing of a
portrait, it's very inflected by what it is to be here. By the city that is an
animation in itself and that's always seemed very valuable to me and that's why
I've stayed here all these years.