Tacita Dean

The title Quatemary is a deliberate misspelling of the English 'quaternary', the geological period that began 2.58 million years ago and in which we still live today. Dean combined 19th century albumen prints with her own writings and drawings. She tells an epic narrative within a single pictorial frame. Her inspiration was the memory of a documentary on the Yellowstone super volcano: 'The Yellowstone super volcano is a blister of a volcano, which has no release. Soon, the program said, the pressure would become so great that the ground would be wrenched apart causing an explosion of such epic magnitude that several states of America would be wiped out instantaneously, and it would cause the rest of the world to be covered with an ash cloud, so dense that it would block out the sun and cause an ice age.'