Tacita Dean
British European b.1965

Chalk Fall 2018
Chalk on blackboard
Purchased 2021. The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust Collection: The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

This cliff seems solid, like the monumental wall of a fortress. On closer inspection, we see the rough waves churning beneath, and realise the cliff-face is giving way, falling into the ocean.

Tacita Dean evokes the famous White Cliffs of Dover which are eroding evermore swiftly as a result of climate change. Chalk Fall also reflects the social and economic impacts of Brexit on the United Kingdom – an island nation separating from Europe and tearing at its own social fabric in the process.

As Dean began to create Chalk Fall, her close friend Keith Collins was diagnosed with a tumour. ‘Every day’, she recounts, ‘I wrote the date on the board, chalking chalk with chalk in a sedimentation of time and emotion that had a terrible constructive intensity.’ We can also make out chalked notes such as ‘aerial view’ and ‘fade to black’ that are anchored in Dean’s practice as a filmmaker. Chalk Fall is at once a drawing, a journal, a history painting and the record of a deep friendship maintained across an ocean.