William KentridgeItalics Plus, 2024
Prior to creating his paragraphs of glyphs, Kentridge was intrigued by the incentives and challenges of what he describes as, “taking something as immaterial as a shadow and giving it heft”; and the progression from projecting shadows in earlier Plato’s Cave-esque film works like 'Shadow Procession’, ‘More Sweetly Play the Dance’ and so on, to these parades of 'sculptural shadows on shelves’.
As he recalls, “in the Glyptotek in Copenhagen, there is a vitrine filled with noses... in different marbles, like a page from a dictionary devoted to noses and their various shapes and sizes.
...I made a series of linocuts with many versions of the same object – an extract from an archive of images. The rearrangement of those images was like the shifting of various slugs of moveable type. A range of senses or sentences could be made by any number of arrangements of the pages – a different dictionary, with the pages taken out of alphabetical order.
The glyphs started as a collection of ink drawings and paper cut-outs, each on a single page from a dictionary. I realised I had taken a drawing or silhouette and given it just enough body to stand on its own feet – paper, added to cardboard, and put on a stand. I wanted a silhouette with a weight that the shape suggested. A shape not just balancing in space, but filling space. Something to hold in your hand, with both shape and heft.
The drawings created at the beginning were a record of familiar images drawn over the years, particularly images with a simple and recognisable silhouette. The sculptures needed weight, but I still wanted to read them as silhouettes…"
