Tacita Dean was born in
Canterbury, Kent, in 1965, and lives in Berlin.
She works in a variety of different media including drawing, photography
and sound, but she made her mark on the international scene principally
with her 16mm films. Often silent and executed with long takes and
a fixed camera, her films create a sense of immobility imbued with
an enigmatic, mysterious atmosphere, where the narratives (frequently
based on real events) generate a space in which spectators find
themselves face to face with their fears and desires. Recurrent
elements include abandoned buildings, water and coastal shots where
the land meets the sea and the sea reflects the sky. A lighthouse
appears in more than one film, either as a central motif of the
narration or as a significant detail. The cyclic regularity of the
light signal contrasts with the immeasurability of the external
landscape, and insofar as it is an isolated human structure surrounded
by the immensity of the sea, the lighthouse becomes a metaphor of
the human condition.
For example, in Disappearance at Sea I, 1996 (nominated
for the Turner Prize in 1998), she offers a poetic rendering of
the real-life story of Donald Crowhurst, the solo yachtsman who,
driven by a desperate desire to accomplish a major feat, participated
in the 1968 round-the-world Sunday Times Globe Race, from which
he never returned. Dean communicates the increasing solitude and
disorientation that Crowhurst must have experienced. The construction
of the story is such that it functions as a metaphor of the passing
of time, of the human pursuit of destinations that prove ephemeral
and which end in disappearance. The narrative opens with a foreground
shot of the lighthouse beacon of St. Abb in Berwickshire: the lights
revolve slowly, generating a background noise; after several minutes,
there is a shift to a night-time image of sea and sky in which the
lighthouse is visible on the horizon. With the setting of the sun,
a ray of light cuts across the panorama, finally dissolving at the
point where the image becomes completely dark. The sound on the
film is that of the mechanism shown at the beginning. Besides the
film, Disappearance at Sea includes a series of drawings
in white chalk on a blackboard, which trace a kind of still image
where the evident erasures contribute to the idea of the development
of the action. |
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