When I am trying to name my pots I search the back of my mind for a shape association. It’s like trying to name an unresolved riddle that I can’t quite put my finger upon. When I began making these shapes I thought of them as caterpillars, reminiscent of a pot I made in the seventh grade. That was a time when I made things based on owls or hippos. These days I work more on the edge of meaning. I am coming to associate these forms with garden pods or turtle shells.

William Kentridge:
“The works by other artists that I keep coming back to have an unresolved riddle, or something at the edge of meaning you can’t quite put your finger on. I remember as a child in our house, there was a print of a Cézanne painting in the dining room with a line of paint on the side of a road, and I couldn’t tell — was that the edge of a drain coming into the road through the wall, or was it a person or a shadow of a person? The brain cannot stop trying to make sense of it.”

—William Kentridge Reflects on What It Means to Be a South African Artist, by Kate Guadagnino, excerpt from a New York Times article in T Magazine, June 9, 2025