Tacita Dean and the Air Outside

Abstract This is an essay about finding space to breathe in the clouds. It begins with Tacita Dean's chalk drawings of clouds in Los Angeles—themselves large billowing forms of white dust on slate—that reveal the irreducible thereness of clouds, unconnected to anything but themselves and the movement of air. Dean renders clouds as impermanent, arial residue—chalk dust and reflected light—whose exchange of fungibility and form is constituted by acts of erasure and amassing. Dean's clouds appear in Ali Smith's novel Spring, where their permanent changeability provides a space to breathe in the midst of catastrophic loss, solacing the mourner with the continued presence of the world after death. The breathing space of the clouds, the possibility of difference forged through loss, is the starting point for the leap of faith that acknowledges the existence of a world that is not ours to have, not ours to occupy; a world that came before and whose exteriority makes breath and its absence possible, producing the twinned conditions of love and mourning.