This haunting image of a yew tree is one of which I keep thinking about. The piece features a photograph of one of the oldest living trees in the UK. Called Crowhurst II (2007), it is one of a series of ‘painted trees’ that Dean began in 2005.
The piece is almost life size, printed on three pieces of photographic paper. The photograph has been painted with white gouache so the tree stands out from its surroundings. It is only when you get closer to the work that muted details of the graveyard in which the tree is situated can be seen.
Another, probably totally unintentional effect, is that of the gallery lights reflecting on the surface of the paper.
These are smartphone images I took when at the gallery. It looks as if a full moon is appearing in the branches of the tree.
According the Among The Trees brochure, Dean was:
‘Prompted by her discovery of a collection of postcards of France’s forest of Fontainebleau while travelling in Japan. Dean began researching the oldest living trees in the UK. One, an 800-year old oak, stood not far from her childhood home in Kent. Another, the yew pictured above, shared its name with Donald Crowhurst, an ill-fated amateur sailor who entered a round-the-world yacht race in 1968, never to return.’
(Among The Trees. 2020 pp. 148)
When digging further into Dean’s tree images, I came across this background information and quote on the Tate website:
‘Dean’s methodology is a combination of idea-driven research with an openness to chance, accident, coincidence and poetic associations which she allows to direct her processes. She has explained what drew her to ‘old and deformed trees’ in an interview with the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides:
I made a photograph for an edition for October magazine recently called Fontainebleau Postcard, and I had to phone them up to check the title, and it reminded me that I had found all these old postcards of The Forest of Fontainebleau when I was in Kitakyushu in Japan, and I remember thinking that’s so strange, why would they have so many postcards of Fontainebleau? And then I went onto the internet and I looked up the Forest of Fontainebleau, which lead me to the famous oak of Fontainebleau, which in turn led me to look up old oak trees and then the oldest of trees in England, the yew tree. Before I knew it, the tiny village where I grew up came up as the place where there once was a 1400-year old yew tree. I always need that tiny thread to get myself going.’
(Quoted in Jeffrey Eugenides, ‘Tacita Dean’, Bomb 95, spring 2006, http://www.bombsite.com/issues/95/articles/2801
(‘Majesty’, Tacita Dean, 2006 | Tate, 2020)
Dean’s methodology is similar to my own – find a thread and continue following.
The post also features information on the previous work of Dean’s that influenced these images:
‘In 2005, Dean created a series of Deformed Trees (reproduced Vischer and Friedli, pp.101–3), painting over the background, and sometimes also the foreground, of old black and white postcards depicting trees. The postcards came from a collection she had been acquiring from fleamarkets all over the world since the mid 1990s. The application of white onto a darker ground has its origin in Dean’s work with a series of drawings on blackboards initiated while she was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London (MA 1990–2). Her work Sixteen Blackboards – a grid of sixteen square photographs documenting the progression of imagery, including drawing, writing, collage and rubbing out on a single black panel (reproduced Vischer and Friedli, pp.56–65) – featured in the Slade’s 1992 postgraduate exhibition. Elements of this, developed further by such works as The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days 1997 (T07613) – a series of drawings in white chalk on seven actual blackboards – are the precursors of Majesty and the group of photographs to which it belongs. The large areas of white overpainting on the photographs echo the patches of white left on the blackboards after rubbing out the drawings and text inscribed with chalk.’
(‘Majesty’, Tacita Dean, 2006 | Tate, 2020)
References
Among The Trees. (2020). London: Hayward Gallery Publishing
Pointdironie.com. 2020. Le Point D’ironie – N°36 Tacita Dean. [online] Available at: <http://www.pointdironie.com/in/36/dean_en.php> [Accessed 23 November 2020].
Tate. 2020. ‘Majesty’, Tacita Dean, 2006 | Tate. [online] Available at: <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dean-majesty-t12805> [Accessed 20 October 2020].
Jennie Meadows MA Photography 