William KentridgePaper Procession IV (Large), 2023
Kentridge’s large ‘Paper Procession’ sculptures were created to be displayed along a long stretch of grass against a century-old tall, dark yew hedge as key substantial works in his Yorkshire Sculpture Park solo exhibition. He initially created smaller, 30 centimetre-high versions of them created paper hand-torn from the pages of a 19th-century accounting journal from the Chiesa di San Francesco Saverio in Palermo.
Kentridge experimented with the original paper fragments on his studio and kitchen tables, until forms started to present themselves. As he put it, “You play with these shapes and then this one starts to become like a woman leaning forward, and so on, and so on. It’s about letting yourself be guided by your eyes.”
These six, semi-abstract, humanoid, brightly coloured paper fragments were then transformed into large-scale forms, that appear paper thin and fragile and prone to flying away in the next breeze, but are in fact painted aluminium panels fixed to steel armatures, resembling moving sketches that convey a sense of dance and procession. As such, despite being 5 metres tall, they feel anti-monumental, perennially ‘at play’ in ways that defy their mass and solidity.
And their relationship with the landscape they’re dancing within, changes with the weather and seasons. As Kentridge puts it, “The coloured sculptures were a sense of thinking about how to make sculpture visible against a landscape. I have a sense they’re going to look best when it’s winter and the sky is dark, but I’m very pleased with how they look already in the middle of the Yorkshire summer…This is very much in the tradition of the grand gardens of the grand parks, with nature as a canvas to be painted on”.
