In April 2024, Tacita Dean traveled to Eagle Pass, Texas, with a singular intention: to watch a total solar eclipse. Having filmed several total eclipses over the years, she wanted to experience one without being behind the lens. Yet when the eclipse arrived, instinct took over. 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 blackness of the sky. "These were just miraculous," Dean has said. "I thought, my God, this is drawing with the sun — you can see the bite of the moon."

Those accidental gestures have now been translated into a suite of twelve screenprints produced in collaboration with Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles. The Eclipse Drawings, previewed in exhibitions in 2025 and completed in 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.

The scale of the works varies dramatically, from intimate prints measuring just 12 × 18 inches to expansive sheets approaching 30 × 44 inches, each format calibrating a different relationship between the viewer and the light Dean has captured. Together, the twelve works form a visual sequence that reads almost like a map — an improvised charting of a moment of cosmic alignment. They represent a collision of time events: the few minutes of totality, when the moon covers the sun, with the seconds it takes for the shutter of her analog camera to open to expose the negative.

In surrendering the viewfinder, Dean discovered a method that collapsed the boundary between observation and mark-making, between the celestial and the handmade. The screenprinting process at Gemini — with its capacity for layered, luminous color — proved an ideal medium for translating that discovery into editions of lasting presence.