Dispatched to Tate Britain, News Hour discovered something quite unexpected on a cold Sunday afternoon – art by ex-EastEnders actress Letitia Dean. Was this to be a retrospective on etchings etched between takes at the Queen Vic? Sadly, no – closer inspection of the label revealed it to announce work by the nautically tilted filmmaker Tacita Dean, whose seven, large scale combinations of blackboard and chalk lay in the room ahead.
Roaring Forties displays the plight of a ship caught in a vicious swell, and amounts to cinematic storyboarding on a huge scale, with a few cells missing. Camera directions and production notes litter massive chalk drawings of swells, barely buoyant ships and weatherbeaten seamen. The fluid nature of the drawings allows the imagination to insert connective narrative, which is rather pleasant; even the figures, when drawn in close up, are handily anonymous. Each blackboard measures around 8 by 7 feet, and they make a stirring addition to the Tate’s Drawn From The Collection.(Side note: Roaring Forties relates to windy latitudes, although it appears to be the name of the vessel here.) You can get an idea here but, if you’re visiting London, it’s worth seeing in the flesh.
Even to those unfamiliar with her, the name Tacita may ring an alarmingly loud bell; perhaps because it’s a feminisation of Tacitus, the great Roman historian and senator. Intriguingly, Tacita’s brother is TV’s Ptolemy Dean, the architect – Ptolemy was a noted scientist from Roman Egypt. One suspects their parents had something of a fascination for the classics.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 