Film
Dean is best known for her work in 16 mm film, although she utilises a variety of media including drawing, photography and sound. Her films often employ long takes and steady camera angles to create a contemplative atmosphere. She has also published several pieces of her own writing, which she refers to as 'asides,' which complement her visual work. Since the mid-1990s her films have not included commentary, but are instead accompanied by often understated optical sound tracks.
The sea was a persistent theme in Dean's work, especially during the 1990s. During that decade, she explored the maritime misadventures of Donald Crowhurst, an amateur English sailor whose ambition to enter a race to solo circumnavigate the globe ended in deception, existential crisis and, eventually, tragedy. Dean has made a number of films and blackboard drawings relating to the Crowhurst story, exploiting the metaphorical richness of such motifs as the ocean, lighthouses and shipwrecks. Re-turning to her attraction with the sea, Amadeus (swell consopio) was made for the Folkestone Triennial (three-year art show) in 2008.
In 1997, Dean made an audio work based on her futile effort to find the submerged artwork Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson in the Great Salt Lake of Utah.
Sound Mirrors (1999) takes its name from the tracking devices built during the 1920s and 1930s and planted in the Kent countryside to detect incoming German aircraft.
In 2000, Dean was awarded a one-year German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship to Berlin, where she moved that year with her partner, artist Mathew Hale. She devoted attention to the architecture and cultural history of Germany, making films of such iconic structure as the Palast der Republik. Fernsehturm, is a 44-minute film set in the revolving cafe of the East Berlin television tower, completed in 1969 on Alexanderplatz. Other projects have concerned important figures in post-war German cultural history, such as W. G. Sebald and Joseph Beuys.
Recent films are about artists and thinkers of the last fifty years and feature Mario Merz, Merce Cunningham, Leo Steinberg, Julie Mehretu, Claes Oldenburg, and Cy Twombly. For example, Craneway Event (2008) is a film about Cunningham working on something with his dancers over three afternoons on site.
In 2006, Dean shot Kodak, a movie in a Kodak factory in eastern France – the last one in Europe to produce 16-mm film stock. A few weeks after she visited, it closed for good.
In 2013, Dean exhibited JG, a 26-minute 35 mm film in colour and black and white at the Frith Street Gallery in London. The film returns to Dean's fascination with the famous land artwork Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson and her friendship with the science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard. During the film, the viewer also hears excerpts from the writings and correspondence of Ballard as well as of Smithson, all read by actor Jim Broadbent.
