Blind Folly or How Tacita Dean Draws

In this book, curator Michelle White considers the unique and timely implications of how the artist Tacita Dean draws. Covering over three decades of work, from sweeping chalk landscapes to fleeting celestial phenomena on film, White proposes that the artist approaches drawing as an indeterminate journey of fate and folly, chance and medium. She argues that Dean’s strategy of adopting blindness to make an image is an urgent response to our culturally, technologically, and ecologically unstable moment. The text, illustrated with more than forty images, is based on seven years of conversations between the author and the artist.

Co-published with the Menil Foundation on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Tacita Dean: Blind Folly’, 11 October–19 April 2025.