︎

SITES OF CREATION 


Creative isolation may be the silver lining of lockdown following Derek Jarman’s footsteps  

Solitude and stillness can be food for a creative soul, now more than ever. The isolation and distance from society that we face today as an imposed restriction is the same Derek Jarman willingly sought in 1986 when buying Prospect Cottage in Kent. Recently saved by a crowdfunding announced by Slade School of Art and supported by ArtFound and names as Tilda Swinton, more than 3.5 millions were gathered to buy and protect the cottage. The project is to turn his house in a site of creation — a place for artistic activity and thinking whose uniqueness comes from its remoteness.




Activist, filmmaker, painter, writer and radical gardener, Jarman met a whole new creative phase in his sequestered and otherwordly realm in Dungeness between the sea and a nuclear power station. The decision to isolate in that former fishermen’s house that he defined “the end of the globe, the Fifth Quarter of the World”, comes after his HIV diagnosis that will lead his passing in 1994. This secluded retreat served as both a refuge and a new perspective. With Prospect Cottage as his restorative escape and away from the pressure of London, Jarman’s creative freedom bloomed as he became highly productive in the last seven years of his life. 
Tate Britain will now take on all his sketchbooks and materials from the cottage and will exhibit them as a tribute to Jarman and creativeness in isolation while the opening of Derek Jarman: My Garden’s Boundaries are the Horizon exhibition at the Garden Museum of London has been postponed to the 4th of July.


“The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time — the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.”




Wrecks found on the beach in Jarman’s early morning walks, old train rails and wild plants composed a work of art that still attracts hundreds of visitors. Built with the help and support of his last and most loved companion Keith Collins and his friend Howard Sooley, photographer and gardening enthusiast, the bare desert that surrounded his hermitage turned into the iconic garden that became symbol of his character. The new found connection with nature that he always sought created a new sensibility in his late works like Blue (1993), The Last of England (1987) and finally The Garden (1990) inspired and set in his Dungeness oasis.

“I waited a lifetime to build my garden / I built my garden with the colours of healing” wrote Jarman in his last diary Smiling in Slow Motion (2001) talking about his healing from society’s suffocating pressures. Jarman knew creativity need space and time and relentlessly looked for it until he finally find his cure in isolation — his land of unruffled freedom and new perspectives.



WORDS BY CHIARA IMAGES BY LEO