Dead Budgie Project

The photogravure series Dead Budgie Project is based on amateur photographs that Tacita Dean found and reproduced in a larger format, employing the sensitive, grainy tactility of the photogravure. Memory is narrative by nature, and in Dead Budgie Project, the various scenes follow each other in a classic, forward-moving narrative. From the owner’s warm relationship with her bird to its life inside and outside its cage until it drops form its perch, lying dead at the bottom of its cage, and is buried in a padded box decorated with flowers.
Dean has appropriated someone else’s memories, and through her mediating act, she points out that a memory of something always takes place in the here and now. It shapes our insight into the past as well as the present. It is a corrective to the future.