A conversation between British-European artist Tacita Dean and Fruitmarket Director Fiona Bradley, recorded in 2018 to accompany Dean’s exhibition Woman with a Red Hat.

Best known for her use of film, and her advocacy for its preservation as an artistic medium, Tacita has a wide-ranging practice that includes drawings, photographs, installations and collections of found objects and images.

She was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998, won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006, and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008.

The works in her Fruitmarket exhibition asked us to consider the ways in which theatrical artifice can transport us, and ultimately deliver truth through fiction.

The title – Woman with a Red Hat – was taken from the film Event for a Stage, around which the exhibition pivoted. Originally commissioned for the 2014 Sydney Biennale as a live theatre piece, the work was Dean’s first foray into the theatre and her first experience of working with an actor. The film is an intricate interweaving of the four consecutive performances of the piece. The fierce interplay between the artist and the actor, Stephen Dillane, as they struggle to understand and accommodate each other’s artforms makes for a compelling, complex investigation into the balance of reality and illusion in both.

For more details about the show, visit the Fruitmarket online archive. The book which accompanied the exhibition is available from Fruitmarket’s online bookshop.

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