Whilst creating his paragraphs of small glyph sculptures Kentridge realised that he wanted the glyphs to be “... seen as silhouettes, but then in the working of them they shift to being something more than extrusions, they have a much wider life.”

Part of that wider life entailed selecting a few particular small glyphs to experiment what would happen to them when they were significantly larger and potentially in isolation, and key to this was to discover what would happen to Kentridge’s scribble cat were in to grow larger that life, and become what he describes as, “...the opposite of stroking a cat – the idea of when you try to stroke one, and its hair stands on end from static electricity. Mayakovsky has a character in his play ‘A Tragedy’ appeal to us to “stroke back cats, stroke back cats” catch the sparks from their fur and with that electricity and use it to run the trams the next morning. And on this larger scale it’s almost like the cat as cactus, the anti-stroke”.

This medium-sized ‘Stroke’ has two faces, indicative of the feline domestic-but-wild creatures we’ve come to know, but perhaps not entirely trust. There are also the public and private faces of both the Mayakovsky who used to believe in Bolshevism and enthusiastically espouse the party line and the one who was beginning to become wholly disillusioned by Stalinist absurdities, and also, in a broader sense, the ongoing, necessary wrestling between optimism and despondency, realism and idealism that’s at the heart of all of Kentridge's performances and projected shadows.

'Fabric Bronze II' is part of a series of bronze sculptures, each of which is hand- painted with a Dutch wax textile pattern, that explore the notion of harnessing the wind and freezing it in a moment of time. The work manifests as a three-dimensional piece of fabric that appears to be blowing in reaction to the natural elements of the surrounding environment. The tension of these abstract works will be heightened by the contrast of the media used, and the delicate movement recreated. Here, the piece refers the solidity of a sculptural object, whilst also encapsulating the naturally occurring phenomenon of wind. The structure is deconstructed by patterns normally associated with soft wearable textile.

William Kentridge’s 'Lexicon' (2017) is an accumulation of elemental symbols within the artist’s larger practice. The series of bronze sculptures, functions as a form of visual dictionary.  These sculptures are symbols, glyphs, suggested words or icons, many of which have been used repeatedly across projects and bodies of work.  The glyphs can be arranged in order to construct sculptural sentences and rearranged to deny meaning.  In late 2017 and early 2018, Kentridge chose a group of ten glyphs from the small-scale Lexicon set and made medium scale versions, each of close to a metre in height.