Tacita Dean

Girl Stowaway is based on the history of a girl who, disguised as a boy, travelled from Australia to England as a stowaway on a large sailing vessel in 1928. Dean mingled the girl’s narrative with her own storyline. She writes the following: 'Her voyage had a beginning and an end, and exists as a recorded passage of time. My own journey follows no such linear narrative. It started at the moment I found the photograph but has meandered ever since, through unchartered research and to no obvious destination. It has become a passage into history along the line that divides fact from fiction, like a journey through an underworld of chance intervention and epic encounter. My story is about coincidence, and about what is invited and what is not.'
For Girl Stowaway Dean allowed herself to be guided by coincidences and chance encounters. Despite this, the result is a surprisingly coherent tale. It began with the discovery of a photograph of Jean Jeinnie in the book The Last of the Wind Ships. After having lost her handbag - and the photograph - at an airport, Dean simulated a newspaper article in order to give credibility to the incident. In a second article, carried out in the style of a local newspaper from 1928, Dean makes Dublin, the place where her bag turned up a week later, the final destination of Jean Jeinnie. Her investigation led her to the author Jean Genet as well as to the shipwrecked Herzogin Cecilie in Starehole Bay, where the artist happened to witness a murder investigation.
The blackboard drawings that Tacita Dean has been making since 1990 as accompaniment to her films are also referred to by her as 'dysfunctional storyboards'. While a storyboard serves as a framework for a narrative, chronology is precisely what these drawings lack. Dean produces them after finishing a film, as a kind of 'post-production still'. Contained in each image is an action and the lapsing of time. Her drawing process, which involves fluid movements of applying and then removing elements reflects the of the sea.