Air

For Dean, the creation of Chalk Fall was intensely personal. She made the drawing over a period of months, working from a cherry picker, starting high at the cliff’s edge and working downwards to the ocean. As she began the process, Dean’s close friend Keith Collins was diagnosed with a tumour. ‘Every day’, says the artist, ‘I wrote the date on the board, chalking chalk with chalk in a sedimentation of time and emotion that had a terrible constructive intensity . . . Waiting, notching time as I descended.’ 2 As is her habit when drawing, Dean made notations directly on the surface of the work which are cinematic and reflect her practice as a filmmaker. We see words such as ‘aerial view’ and ‘fade to black’; ‘Penultimate day’ — presumably made just before Keith’s death; and ‘pantograph’, a device Keith proposed as analogous to the connection the friends maintained across the distance separating them. Chalk Fall is therefore a drawing, a journal, a history painting and the record of a deep friendship maintained across an ocean. Dean is known for her work with ‘vulnerable’ media: not only chalk but also 16 and 35mm film. Chalk on board is fragile and ever poised to accommodate change, learning, conversations, amendments and new information. Evocative of the chalkboards that were once a mainstay of classrooms and the learning process, Dean’s expansive drawings set the continual processes of change against our desire to give shape and narrative to the world. Chalk Fall has a quality of history painting while representing the vast and ephemeral subjects of sea, sky and clouds. GB 2 Tacita Dean, ‘Antigone’ [exhibition material], Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, 2021. Tacita Dean / Chalk Fall (detail) 2018 ‘Dean evokes the famous White Cliffs of Dover memorialised in song and poetry and increasingly impacted by climate change and rising sea levels.’ 178 Change