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... Best known for her 16-millimetre films relating to maritime adventurer Donald Crowhurst, or her work with American choreographer Merce Cunningham or W. G. Sebald's translator Michael Hamburger - while also employing the mediums of photography, printmaking, drawing and text - the British-born Tacita Dean is an artistic conjurer of lost time and the mysteries of the natural world. She emerged onto the international art scene in the 1990s, and visited Melbourne in 2009 for her mini-retrospective at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) ...

Sarah Tutton: In a text accompanying your T& I photogravure work at ACCA, you write about the difficulty of making art, likening it to alchemy. So many influential artists, scientists and thinkers have been interested in a highly sophisticated alchemy, and this engagement has left a lasting philosophical foundation. Yet many artists seem wary of making these parallels ...

Tacita Dean: Well, some artists prefer not to be seen as wizards. There's a whole thing in the art world now which insists on the cerebral. But turning a piece of paper into a drawing is a sort of alchemy. There's always a struggle in transforming something dull into something glittery ...

ST: You were originally one of a group of artists invited to make a work in a theatrical context for the 2007 Manchester International Festival.

TD: Yes, that led to the relationship that I had with Merce (Cunningham). Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS was such a gift. He had not appeared in front of cameras for a while before then and I didn't know how he was going to perform to John Cage's 4'33'' - that was entirely his own making. I was just there to witness it. Afterwards he asked me to do Craneway Event with him in San Francisco. In 2008 Trevor Carlson, the company's director and I went to see the space, which Merce loved so much because it was a former Ford Motor factory on a jetty surrounded by the Bay Bridge and the sea. We filmed it in November and it was a monster - we filmed for three days and shot 17 hours. The project was as much to do with his faith in the work of art as it was about anything else. During his life Merce was very integrated with the visual arts and the beauty of Craneway Event is that he's looking at the stage so pictorially, not unlike a visual artist.

Chance remains such a huge part of Merce's work - what he does in relation to sound and the fact that his dancers actually count, that they don't hear the music until the night of the performance. So I've just got the rehearsal process and the to-ing and fro-ing between Merce and his performers, and I've recorded the sound, but not the sound that they're going to be dancing to. I recorded the sound at the time, which is just the sound of nothing. It is the sound of life ...

ST: There is often a sense of time speeding up and slowing down in your work. Film is obviously a time-based medium and I'm interested in your thoughts about the relationship between film and time.

TD: Film is a medium of time - you have to think about it from the very beginning. So when you have a reel of film you know, for example, it's always 2.5 or 10 minutes long. These are decisions that you've already taken into account. There is no passivity in relation to film, it's always very active. And then there is the sense of the timing of things. Now that digital technology has taken over, a lot of people don't understand that film is also a very edited medium. Everyone thinks that you just put a camera on the table and it will record, but of course with film this is never the case ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2010 issue.