Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean’s work was seen most recently in Mise en Scene at the ICA, London in October. She presented two projects: The Martyrdom of St. Agatha and Girl Stowaway. Both projects were triggered by chance encounters that then became the catalyst for dense narratives that entwined contemporary events, historical fact and fictional inventions.

In a new project for Frith Street Gallery, Dean continues her inquiry into luck, chance and coincidence. She has recently taken up a scholarship in Bourges, France and this becomes the basis of her project. As an introduction Dean shows her ‘Four, Five, Six and Seven Leaf Clover Collection’. Is this collection, which she has been amassing since she was eight, the embodiment of luck? And why are clovers thought to be lucky anyway?

The second half of Dean’s project, Upper Air, Clear Sky, encompasses a short film, a photograph and a small collection of drawings made with gold leaf. It draws upon the rich surroundings of Bourges, an ornate, medieval town which was also an important centre for alchemy, the process of transmuting other substances into gold, and the elixir of life. Alchemists in Bourges believed that, if it was distilled in the proper way, dew was the essential ingredient for the manufacture of gold. With its relationship to Heaven and Earth (its evaporation, voyage up to Heaven and condensation back to Earth) dew was considered to have 'the etheric essence of the forces of Spring' and to be a metaphor for the soul.

A Bag of Air, a three minute film taken from a hot air balloon, shows the hands of a figure gathering the clear air in a plastic bag. It connects back to a childhood desire to bring clouds down to earth, and to suspend the belief that something so physical cannot be invisible. An accompanying photograph depicts the bags of dew laid out on the floor of the Palais Jacques Coeur, the superb medieval home of the noted 16th century alchemist and entrepreneur. The Palais is emblematic of the architecture of Bourges and the desire to give a physical expression to the intangible. The buildings are huge physical manifestations of the spiritual; their ornate sculptures and carvings serve as ciphers as to why the buildings were constructed. Dean’s entire project touches upon humankind’s need to turn the invisible into the visible and to make something physical out of the immaterial.