Eclipse Drawings #2

In April 2024, Tacita Dean traveled to Eagle Pass, Texas, to watch a total solar eclipse. When the moon passed between the sun and earth, she reached for her camera and not looking through the viewfinder, she twisted and turned it toward the sun, spinning and snapping with little aim or calculation. When the negatives were processed, something extraordinary emerged: not photographs in any conventional sense, but drawings made with sunlight itself, loops and arcs of luminous energy seared onto the blackness of the sky. Those accidental gestures have now been translated into a suite of twelve screenprints published by Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles. The Eclipse Drawings (2026) are screenprints of exceptional technical ambition — each print rendered in as many as eighteen colors — yet what they convey feels spontaneous: glowing lines and looping forms suspended against deep black grounds, caught in between celestial documentation and pure abstraction.