Sometimes there are performers in front of the animated films 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 thought travelling three centimetres from one part of the brain to another it's the eight metres walk across the studio from one drawing to another image and filling the studio with all the stages of a project as it happens, the ink, the charcoal, the pages, 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 sculptures are 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 used they become more recalcitrant and don't keep their shape.

So there's a kind of 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 out but by sticking other sheets over and 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.

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.

And 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, you know, white middle class South African who's had the first 40 years of my life under apartheid in the last 20 years in the period since the first democratic elections.

So aware of those contradictions.

That's the position from which the art has always been made.

Where 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 authoritarian politics or certainty of knowledge of making ambiguity and contradiction its central lifeblood showing that these are not just mistakes at the edge of understanding but the way in which 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.

It'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 to the world is fundamental to the work.

Even if the work isn't about that, even if it's painting a landscape or drawing a 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 been very valuable to me and that's why I've stayed here all these years. www.circlelineartschool.com