The backyard that the author, artist and film-maker Derek Jarman conjured up on a blasted plain of littoral shingle close to Dungeness energy station in Kent is, I’d guess, pretty well-known. Certainly, since Jarman’s demise in 1994, his formulation of sparse planting punctuated by totemic preparations of post-industrial objets trouvés has overspread its faintly Dadaist roots and conquered the weekend life-style pages: there could be few gardeners inside spitting distance of the seaside whose blessed plot doesn’t incorporate a couple of attention-grabbing pebbles, bits of rusty iron, railway sleepers and the like.
What’s much less well-known, or it was to me, is the extent to which the backyard was not simply maintained however enhanced after the maestro’s demise by “the widow Jarman”, Keith Collins, recognized to Jarman as Hinney Beast or HB, who labored variously as an IT man, actor, fisherman and London Underground prepare driver, and was thus much more of a person o’components than Jarman himself. Their relationship might have been technically chaste—“Keith had prior to now joked that Derek was too previous for him, and he had at all times been too previous for Derek,” remembers the creator and photographer Gilbert McCarragher within the e book Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman’s Home—however it was none the much less deeply nurturing and consoling for each events.
McCarragher, a Jarman fan since his sad childhood in a ferociously homophobic Northern Eire, and extra just lately a neighbour after which a good friend of Collins, acquired the fee to {photograph} the backyard and the enchanting if vaguely peri-apocalyptic shack at its centre in 2018. Collins had just lately been identified with a mind tumour and would quickly die in hospital. McCarragher due to this fact had the run of the place at a liminal second, when it was nonetheless what it had been—a weekend love nest, a studio for Jarman, a spot for Collins to grieve, then start to stay once more, all of the whereas tending the backyard and conserving the flame—however would likely sooner or later be scrubbed and sanitised, ossified into heritage.
Love, sorrow and laughter
McCarragher sees the home not a lot as a doc of a Nice Man’s aesthetic life however as a spot of intimacy and familiarity, the place love, sorrow and laughter nonetheless cost the air. The result’s much less tidy than many books about artists’ homes, however it’s significantly extra affecting. A number of of Jarman’s work nonetheless hold within the cottage; these get darker and cruder as his eyesight fades, one among many sicknesses he suffered because of contracting Aids. Materials regarding his profession in movie is usually boxed up within the little attic, accessed by a rickety outdoors staircase; however there are a couple of stills on the partitions, and a clapperboard and a plaster bust of Mausolus of Halicarnassus from The Tempest (1979). His trademark Bauhaus-style boilersuits hold on doorways right here and there.
There are a lot of talismans made out of the domestically plentiful “holey stones” strung collectively—McCarragher information his disappointment at by no means having been being given one among these by Collins—and a prodigious bronze dildo solid by the musician and occultist Genesis P-Orridge, copies of which had been despatched out to disfavoured file firm execs (the way it entered the Jarman assortment is a thriller). There’s some good brown furnishings within the Kettle’s Yard vein. Jarman, or Collins, or each of them, used wire to bind issues collectively in advert hoc union: a plastic He-Man determine and a statuette of an armless Grecian maiden; two chimney pots (“I discovered the act of the stronger pot lending its energy to the opposite comforting,” McCarragher says). Jarman carved little billets-doux to Collins into the floor of glass blocks, and hooked up John Donne’s poem “The Solar Rising” to the skin of the home, letter by letter.
“A spot of intimacy and familiarity”: one of many discovered object preparations within the inside of Prospect Cottage, from round 1988© Gilbert McCarragher
One is used to seeing the home from outdoors: crisp, symmetrical and a bit extreme, its black weatherboards and yellow window frames offering a counterweight to the wispier types of the backyard and the grim horizontality of the encompassing panorama. McCarragher tells us that Jarman started planting impulsively, staking a windblown dogwood to a bit of driftwood—extra binding—however that it grew to become a process of nice significance to him, an act of remembrance for folks with Aids and a defiant try and construct and maintain one thing lovely in a hostile place (although McCarragher cites native lore to the impact that the facility station has created a microclimate that’s not unkind to vegetation). It appears that evidently Collins, with a bit skilled assist, launched extra color to the backyard after 1994.
Due to the Artwork Fund, Prospect Cottage was saved from the rapacious jaws of the housing market and is now open to the general public, administered by Inventive Folkestone, an arts quango energetically pursuing the aim of culture-led regeneration in a reasonably embattled a part of the world. Presumably a number of the emotional vibrations that McCarragher captures so completely in his photos, and discusses within the considerably dishevelled textual content that accompanies them, may have been ironed out, a lot as Jarman himself deprecated the way in which the Nationwide Belief erased all hint of “the Sackville-Wests’ pursuit of bare guardsmen within the … herbaceous … borders” at Sissinghurst. Nevertheless it should nonetheless be a piercingly pretty place.
Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman’s Home, by Gilbert McCarragher. Thames & Hudson, 192pp, 165 color illustrations, £25/$35 (hb), printed 4 April/4 June
