The cosmic clock with Ballard at its core

The late writer was a big influence on Tacita Dean. She remembers her friend - and their shared obsession with an artwork in Utah

• Tacita Dean
• The Guardian, Monday 27 April 2009
• Article history

Spiral Jetty, a 1970 earthworks sculpture of a 1,500 foot long spiral made of 6,650 tons of black basalt. Photograph: George Steinmetz/Corbis

I first wrote to JG Ballard about Donald Crowhurst, the lone yachtsman who disappeared at sea in 1969 after his failed attempt to be first to sail non-stop around the world. I had just returned from photographing Crowhurst's abandoned trimaran on the Caribbean island of Cayman Brac, so I sent him a picture of it and asked what he thought. The name, Crowhurst, at the very least, sounded like one of his characters. I received a letter back in what became his familiar handsome handwriting on his Shepperton-headed notepaper. No, he had no particular interest in Crowhurst and considered him to have been a foolish man, but his boat looked like one of those second world war crashed aircraft still being found in the jungles of the Pacific islands, which he supposed, in a way, it was.

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