She is esteemed for her drawings, photographs, prints and sound works, as well as her artists’ books and texts. She studied at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art before moving to live and work in Berlin in 2000. Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, UK. However, in 1997 the jetty had not risen and I never found it, but I returned from Rozel Point with something perhaps more important: pieces of salinated tumbleweed and unrequited desire.

Spiral Jetty has a new vista for the satellite generation. Nowadays, there is a parking area and signposts, and Google Earth has allowed for the one unimaginable view of the artwork that would have defied even Smithson’s atavistic expectations: God’s view. When I went looking for it, it was hard to find and kept its mystery close: an old-fashioned odyssey. The possibility that it might have an actual existing physical form seemed implausible. Memory is best alerted by new circumstance: suddenly I saw the projected image of the Spiral Jetty in my mind’s eye, emblematic and powerful. Of course, I thought, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is in Utah. At that moment, I remembered distinctly the art school lecture and the monochrome slide. I was on my way to Utah and someone mentioned that maybe the Spiral Jetty had risen. It started with an off-the-cuff remark in New York in the summer of 1997. I have learned to trust in this process of delay and retrieval. Ballard, in a letter to me, dated December 4, 2007Īlthough the ideas behind this project began over 15 years ago, it is important that the film was made now. “Treat it as a mystery that your film will solve.”

Spiral jetty utah swimming