A tempestuous scene depicting a stormy sea, Wake is Tacita Dean's intuitive, gestural maelstrom that brilliantly conveys the impression of a crashing wave. Rapidly yet masterfully executed with chalk on blackboard, the contrast between black and white heightens the forceful effect. Dean creates the form of the wave with the most economical of means, leaving the majority of the blackboard untouched. In many parts, she has simply smudged the chalk to invoke the sea spray or the direction of the rolling wave, which is surrounded by words such as rain, wake and pissing down. Rather like acting directions from the world of film and theatre, they are used as choreography. Dean explained 'from the moment I started to draw I always located whatever I was doing in a time and a place.' (T. Dean quoted in Tacita Dean, exh. cat., Schaulager Basel, Basel, 2006, p. 19). These references to the language of film reveal how central the practice of drawing is to her work, which had the sea as a persistent theme through the 1990s.
The blackboard drawings began right at the start of Dean's career. The walls of her studio at the Slade, where she studied from 1990-1992, were covered with a Hessian wallpaper that made it difficult to hang the kind of small-scale works that she was creating at the time. To resolve that, she mounted two hardboard panels on the wall that she painted black and drew directly onto using chalk. This developed into works like Wake, where she fully takes advantage of the potential offered by the medium, creating a work of sublime force that almost seems to come crashing down on the viewer standing before it.
