Like a Summer’s Cloud

Tacita Dean, who primarily works in celluloid film, is interested in photo-chemical analogue modes of image-making. Her works actualise slow and complex production processes that keep track of the effects of time on human beings or natural elements. Along with her works in film and photography, Dean has produced chalk drawings on blackboards and paintings on postcards and photographs, as well as optical sound recordings and installations. Often in series of sequential images, these non-filmic works also explore the filmic medium and its temporality. Pivotal to Dean’s practice, which is driven by chance encounters and the unconscious, is the materialisation of time, history, memory, disappearance and obsolescence.

In 2014–2015, Tacita Dean lived in Los Angeles as an artist- in-residence at the Getty Research Institute. Soon after her arrival, Dean noticed the peculiarity of the clouds in the Californian region. Unlike the clouds she was accustomed to in Europe, these white clouds moving in the picturesque Californian blue sky never turn grey; disconnected from rain, they rather depend on the activity of the winds. Inspired by the grandeur of this celestial landscape, Dean produced a series of works depicting various clouds in several media, such as chalk on black cardboard, overpainted postcards and, later on, by using the technique of colour lithography. Dean first produced a body of work titled "Concordance of Fifty American Clouds” (2016), a series consisting of fifty pieces. The six works included in the Arter Collection, whose titles refer to William Shakespeare’s plays containing the word “cloud”, belong to this series. “Like a Summer’s Cloud” belongs to the series of slate works which Dean produced in conjunction with the “LA Exuberance” series. Singled out in a picturesque blue sky, Dean’s clouds situate the viewer above ground level. Abstracting the clouds from temporal and spatial/ geographical references and arresting their movement, the works capture the ephemerality and fugacity of a natural phenomenon by means of a still image, while offering a contemplative moment in order to reflect upon change and permanence.