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and his anger and frustration seep through the canvas.
Their uncompromising nature was matched by his last
film Blue. This film, with the screen saturated with an
unchanging blue, was his most lyrical. It would be foolhardy
to try capture the power and poignancy of this
film in words. With the eyes confounded with nothing
but an infinite blue, you are left to the voice-over to
lead you through Jarman’s imagination and your own
in a way that has never been attempted before.
Jarman’s home and garden at Prospect Cottage in
Dungeness, Kent, figure frequently in his last works,
be it writing or film, and some attempt to address this
has been attempted at the Barbican. Outside the gallery
local children have made their own gardens à la Jarman
to quite good effect. However, nothing can recreate the
sense of isolation and strange other-worldliness present
at Dungeness. It is as if here everything, including time
itself will dissolve at moment into the vast swathes
of shingle. His home and the others around it stand
stranded in this stark landscape, now dominated and
threatened by the vast nuclear reactor behind them.
A posthumous book, Derek Jarman’s Garden (1995),
with splendid photographs by Howard Sooley, captures
the beauty of the place that meant so much to Jarman.
I personally had never considered that gardening could
ever be considered an art form, but what Jarman created
here is nothing but art, albeit more challenging to
construct and maintain as it is an art that continually
BUY Derek Jarman books online from and
changes and grows. Innumerable plants provide islands
of colour that sit in the sea of shingle which flows
through the garden. Driftwood and flotsam punctuate
the garden in the form of sculpture and ultimately serve
to unify it with the area surrounding it. The result is a
bounty of visual delights, made more powerful by the
improbability of their setting. It is characteristic that
Jarman’s writing, even when discussing the creation of
his garden in this book, soon breaks down, and becomes
a discussion of so much more. Surely there is no better
example than Derek Jarman of an artist whose work is
entwined with their life.
How, then, are we to remember this man? Should
he be placed in the shrivelled canon of British 20thcentury
art, filed under ‘minor artist’, or should he be
cast in the limiting role of ‘queer director’, or just dismissed
as loud, over-opinionated, English eccentric? It
is symptomatic of artists who work in several media to
be dismissed as a jack of all trades but master of none.
However, this would clearly not be a worthy epitaph for
a man who obviously excelled in nearly every art form
he chose to turn his hand to. Jarman was also much
more, being not only a very political man, but whose
work also had a great feeling for the decline of all the
positive elements of British culture that have been stifled
and repressed since the start of the Thatcher years.
Whatever his agenda, Jarman always made himself
heard and it’s a voice that painful not to hear now. I feel,
286
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