Tacita Dean. The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days, 1997. Chalk on blackboard support, each: 2438 x 2438 mm. installation. Tate T07613
Unbearably frightening: lost down a mine, lost in space, lost at sea.
Tacita Dean is known for her films, but I once saw a series of large chalk drawings she did, The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days, at the Tate. They are large diagrams, full of film instructions, structural analysis, notes. The Roaring Forties are fierce winds in the Southern Ocean; the ship she was drawing was under sail. The drawing above is of a row of sailors tieing down the mainsail – I think that's what they are doing, my sailing experience only extends to sabots. This mast with sailors also looks eerily vertebral.
Each drawing is on a large 8' square blackboard. They really are notes: just enough information to tell us something about a longer narrative broken into seven chapters, but not enough to get the story. It all remains fugitive, incomplete, partially erased, inconclusive. The drawings appear to be factual – the direction of the wind is noted, for example, yet the scene is never one we could possibly imagine. Lashing the mainsail is something known to only a handful of people in this world, and is mostly known from literary description - small black and white words on paper. Clues are given in these drawings that only enable the imagination, nothing further.
It is interesting that as a filmmaker with the capacity to tell stories in full colour and detail, Dean's films are shadowy narratives much like the ones, always intangible, that haunt us.