I wandered through the exhibition, Tacita Dean in all her glory, from the boxes taunting Monet, to the magic hour photos of the sky above Los Angeles.
It felt like it would be a good retrospective – but then again British artists of the 90s have always had a pull on me because they symbolise experiments from the era I grew up.
It was a drag, though. None of the pieces struck me – except for one.
The Wreck of Hope is a monumental blockbuster of a blackboard, seven metres wide, chalking out a thousand-year-old glacier, paired with the hilarious comment that Tacita Dean likes to draw.
So they call it a drawing, but it’s in the spirit of big landscapes, of grandeur and epic. In the details are fragments of writing, like marginalia drawn amid the peaks and valleys of the ice. The shapes are majestic, the shading hypnotic.
But seeing it was also the first time I encountered a traditional piece of imagery that was so innately ephemeral.
The chalk has been applied unfixed: nothing is used to keep it in place. So despite its scale, this giant image is transient, forever vulnerable; so fragile to a touch or a smudge that the area around the entire piece is alarmed like a vault.
I stared at it for 30 minutes and could have stayed for hours, lost in its contours.
A glacier, vulnerable and strong. Grand, but impermanent; so weak that when they move this piece of art around the world, it’s carefully screwed into boxes that float each panel in place so no other surface can touch it. Because you feel like you could almost just breathe the dust away.
This work doesn’t feel throwaway, even though you get the sense it won’t last.
It is as delicate and ephemeral as ice, as time, as hope.
.
.
.
I experienced Tacita Dean at the MCA, Sydney.