The films come out of a need to make an image, an impulse to make a film, and the meaning emerges over the months of the making of the film.

So the only meaning they have in advance is the need for the film to exist.

All children draw, but most children have the good sense to stop drawing when they reach 14.

But I kept on drawing, and I'd also been, as children do, playing, acting.

And also most children have the good sense to leave it to professionals as they grow up.

But I'd continued.

So at university I was both drawing and acting in different student theatre groups.

And I was advised by everybody to, you have to specialise, you either have to draw or you have to act, but you can't do both, you'll be an amateur.

So I decided I could not be an artist anymore, so I closed my studio, I sold my etching press, and I went to theatre school to learn to be an actor, where I discovered after three weeks I should not be an actor.

So then I was no longer an actor nor an artist, and I tried to be a filmmaker, but I failed at that.

I think one can just write one's biography in terms of being rescued by one's failures.

And I failed at painting, and I failed at acting, and I failed at filmmaking, so I discovered in the end at the age of 30, I think, I was back making drawings.

Even though I thought I wouldn't be an artist, that's the one thing I was doing.

And then later on discovered, in fact, I also wanted to keep going with the theatre, and the drawings became films, and in the end I gave up trying to say what I was.

I was someone who did drawings and theatre and films, and it took me a long time to unlearn the advice I'd been given, and to understand for me the only hope was the cross-fertilisation between different mediums and genres.

I'd been doing it for a long time, drawing, thinking, OK, I'll do this until I find my real job.

And I always told friends, well, at the end I'd end up in a building society or a bank.

And at a certain point a friend of mine said, you understand, you're now 30, you have no work experience, no one will give you a job, you are unemployable, stop having this illusion that you'll find another life, either drown or swim, but accept, this is what you're doing.

And then I thought, OK, I will say to myself, I am an artist, and stuck with that label ever since.

It's very difficult to say how I started with animation.

I think there are like four different origins you can give.

The first and the clearest one, I was painting a set for a piece of theatre, and a friend was making a film about the theatre project, and he thought, oh, it would be interesting to film the painting and construction of the set, but they did it with stop frame delayed action filming, so that the painting and the set construct themselves in a minute rather than in two days.

And I was very held by how this looked, and asked if he would leave the camera in my studio for two days, and that became the first of the animated films of drawing in front of a camera.

So that was the start of animation.

But then I realized that in fact several years before that I'd made another animated film with a friend in the studio performing and shooting stop frame of things that happened, so in fact there had been an earlier history.

And then I told people that was the start.

And then some years later a friend of mine said, you know, I've got an early animated film you made when you were 14 on my home movie camera, 8mm home movie camera, which was like a 20 second piece of drawings on top of each other.

So there are tracks that go back, but also I started thinking it would be interesting to see how a drawing comes into being.

That was the start of the last phase of animation, think about it, photograph myself successively as I make a drawing.

And then I discovered, of course, at the end that you didn't have to stop when the drawing was finished.

You could keep altering the drawing and continuing filming, and suddenly you started making a film.

But the central form, that of erasure and charcoal, was there before the idea of animation.

It wasn't if I said, I want to do animation, what technique will be good?

It will be charcoal.

It was from the charcoal drawing that the process of animation expanded.

And there's something about charcoal as opposed to oil paint, in which just with a wipe of a cloth it disappears, or you erase it very easily, so you can change the drawing as quickly as you can think.

So it had an equivalence to the speed of thinking and the speed of drawing, and a provisionality in the animation.

So you didn't have to make a final drawing.

You could make one fragment of a stage of something with immanence coming into being.

I proceed from an impulse, from an image that's in my head, from something, a phrase, a central idea, and start drawing.

And it's very slow, the animation, it takes several weeks, say, to do a minute.

And then I've got a minute of film, I'll look at that and think, well, what happens if we put this scene first and this scene second, or the other way around, or a third thing in between?

What does it seem to suggest as a trajectory?

And sometimes while drawing this scene, I think, oh, there's another scene inside it that could be drawn, and that gets...

And so it's through a process of accretion, of adding, and discovering while it's being made that the film finds both its structure and its subject.

But it's more about showing the process of thinking that I'm interested.

The way that one constructs a film out of these fragments, which one reinterprets retrospectively and changes the time of, is my sense of how we make sense of the world.

And so the animated films can be a demonstration of how we make sense of the world, rather than an instruction about what the world means.

I think uncertainty is an essential category.

As soon as one gets certain, you hear it in people's voices.

As they are certain of something, their voice gets louder, more authoritarian and authoritative.

And in the end, to defend the police, their voice and their certainty, they'll bring an army with guns to stand next to them to hold onto that.

So there's a desperation in all certainty.

And I think the category of uncertainty, political uncertainty, philosophical uncertainty, uncertainty of images, is much closer to how the world is.

And that also relates to provisionality, to the fact that you can see the world as a series of facts, of photographs, or you can see it as a process of unfolding, where the same thing in a different context has a very different meaning or a very different form.

And I think animation, in a way, builds that into the very process itself.

But I think that provisionality and uncertainty is a very key category.

And so the uncertainty at the start of a film, where there isn't a script or a storyboard, is on the one hand, in my case, an inability to write a story or to draw a storyboard, but it also allows it to function in a more emblematic way of how we understand the world.

What I was trying to show in this film of the split between the artist as a viewer and as a maker, the fact that we occupy both of those subjectivities, was saying this is something which is very obvious in the studio.

You make your drawing and you're very close to it, so you can't really have a good view, and then you step back to look at it, and you see all the things that are wrong.

And you make a mental note to say, alright, when I come back to the drawing, I must remember to shorten it or move this part down or make that darker, and then you step back.

So that separation of oneself into these two contesting subjects is very obvious in the studio and very clear.

What's less obvious and clear is the way that is how we always operate in the world.

So if you're a writer, that since you've written the paragraph and it seems great as you're writing it, and then you reread it and one is disappointed with the fact that it's not better.

It seems so much better when you're writing, and I'm writing such a great four lines of poetry here, this is fantastic, and then you read it and you think, who's the idiot that's written that?

How feeble, why can't he write better?

So I think that split is what I was trying to show using what happens in the studio as an example, as a demonstration of other things.

A lot of the work in the studio is demonstrating emblematically how we make sense of the world outside of the studio, which we naturalize and it becomes invisible.

So if you think of a collage as a classic 20th century art form, where you take fragments of a newspaper headline, a photograph, different things, and you combine them together to make a sense, one's very used to that as an artwork.

But if you think for one instant, one understands that is the way we have to go through the world.

There's no other way of going through the world.

We don't have complete information, we can't take it in.

We take in a fragment, a headline, a memory of a part of a dream, a phone conversation, and through this we construct what feels to us and to others as a coherent being.

When one understands this self, in fact, is a completely provisional, fragile construction of a walking collage of thoughts and ideas and thinking.

I think that's the way in which the space of the studio becomes a demonstration of things much larger than the studio, much larger than the particular drawing.

I mean, in the end, I think I learned much more from the theatre school in Paris, called

Jacques Lecoq, a school of movement and mind, than I ever did from the art lessons at an art foundation I went to, about what constitutes an artwork.

What is the energy you need at the start of a gesture to complete it?

When is something forced and when is something stopped?

Understanding the way of thinking through the body.

I mean, making art is a practical activity for me.

It's not sitting at a computer, it's not thinking through an idea, it's embodying an idea in a physical material, paper, charcoal, steel, wood.

It's allowing the fact that between one's shoulder and one's finger there's an intelligence goes, and a reliance on that intelligence tracking parts of one's brain which aren't the same as one's conscious, planning, rational thoughts.

It's difficult to pin down what it is that's in the mind that is different from chance.

It's not like throwing the I Ching, and it's not from having a clear program.

But it's somewhere in between is an openness to recognize something as it happens.

So I think a central category is recognition.

And for that to operate, you need to have an open field.

If you have a very set plan of where you have to walk, where the drawing is going, it makes it much harder to allow yourself the openness to also see what's arriving by chance, through fortune at the edges.

And I think that's a very important category, both theoretically, but also in terms of strategy.

How does one work in the studio to enable this best to flower?

One of the ways is not to have a script, or a storyboard, or a clear plan.

To not know the answer, and to hang on to, as long as possible, that provisionality and uncertainty.

Well, there's always some guide.

I mean, it's not to say that there's nothing in one's head, and there's nothing.

There's a ton of material in the studio.

There are photo stats you've kept.

There are projects or ideas.

There's the guide of saying, let's take a CD almost at random from the pile, and put that piece of music on, and take this piece of drawing I've been doing, and see what does that sound say to this image?

How can they work together?

All right, let's change the image, but keep the sound.

Or keep the sound, change the image.

There's something once seen in the newspaper.

There's a report of a story that someone has given.

And then the question is, how long do you follow that?

Do you follow that for six months, for two years?

Or at the end of the afternoon, do you see it's a dead end and abandon it?

The danger is that sometimes one works on it for six months, when you should have left it after the first hour.

But it's giving it the benefit of the doubt.

It's not judging it in advance.

It's a believing that there are no good or bad ideas, that the best ideas can be really bad, and a really bad, stupid starting point can be as good as a philosophical essay.

With every project, good or bad, there's periods when you wake up at four in the morning knowing this is a disaster, and you should never have done it.

And so I've understood that that's not a guide of it being either a good or a bad project.

That's an occupational hazard.

It's like a health disease if you're going to be an artist.

Often only at the end.

Often only a year afterwards.

You're very close.

When you're very close to something, it's very protective of it, and you view it in the best way, you give it the best chance, particularly if there are other performers or other people involved.

It takes a distance to say, all right, we spent six months on it, and really there were fundamental flaws in it, which I'd certainly say about some of the work that I've done, without a doubt.

But I wouldn't have said it at the time it was being made.

There's always something at risk, and the risk is that you're spending a huge amount of physical energy, time, days, money, resources, other people's enthusiasm, which can be misplaced.

And so there's a risk of betraying other people's confidence.

There's a risk of being flattered by other people enough into not realizing when something doesn't work and believing the voices coming in.

But ultimately, I suppose long term it has to do, does the piece work for the collaborators you're working with?

And more than that, are there other people outside the room of collaboration for whom it has an echo, an interest?

You do a piece that's beautiful for you, but if it has no resonance for anyone else, that's complicated.

It's often the case that it has strong resonances for some people, and other people see it just as being a mistake from A to Z.

And then one has to give it time and see how it sediments in one's head.

And the work is often completed before I'm satisfied.

And there's a balance.

Sometimes I think, all right, I've done this work, I should really go back and spend six months fixing it.

And then I usually think, no, in six months I can do a whole new project.

This will be as it is, with its faults, with its incompletion.

There is a mood, which I think partly has to do with the imperfect erasure, which leaves a great trace on the paper, with the darkness of charcoal, with those kinds of elements.

But there has also been an exhibition of my work that put it together with some of the graphics of Goya and films of Buster Keaton, that was looking at a different kind of comedic trajectory also.

Which was a surprise for me, I must say.

I hadn't expected it.

But it set in train a whole lot of films that were closer to Buster Keaton and then George

Melies in thinking, which I hope aren't all gloomy.

They may end up being so, but I don't know.

Humour is always a way, and self-irony is a way of acknowledging the futility of the self-aggrandisement of certainty.

So for me, one of the great heroic figures in South African politics is Bishop Desmond