April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 13powerful. The garden, iron grey and glaucous
green in January, mesmerises. It’s like being in
a kaleidoscope, every step or turn of the head
affording new aspects and alignments of plants,
rocks, sculptures, cottage and landscape.
Indeed, Prospect Cottage was a confluent
place in Jarman’s life, channelling many streams.
It was a home and refuge, a place of solace and
fortification with friends, but also a site requiring
occasional defence against prurient press,
over-ardent fans or cheeky pruners. It was the
main location for The Garden (1990), Jarman’s
Super 8 reverie on religion, media, politics
and persecution, and features prominently in
his journals (published as Modern Nature and
Smiling in Slow Motion) and the 1995 book Derek
Jarman’s Garden, alongside Howard Sooley’s
photographs. The garden was a serious thing,
attracting the attention of English Nature and
the Royal Horticultural Society and connecting
Jarman to historical lineages of both garden-
and art-making, from Tudor to Fluxus. It also
evoked his own experiences with planted
land, from his earliest memories to romantic
interludes to intimations of mortality.
“My garden is a memorial,” he wrote, “each
circular bed and dial a true lover’s knot.” Here
is the garden as affective archive, but also as
part of an organic line whose tendrils stretch
from Eden to Hampstead Heath. “The alfresco
fuck is the original fuck,” Jarman observed.
Prospect Cottage was a site of queer being and
becoming, community and care – and Jarman
was active in reclaiming ‘queer’ as a word and
a position against a normative gay identity he
disdained. On Dungeness beach, he was canonised
by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in “high
palare”, wearing the coronation gown from
Edward II (1991), gold sparkling on the shingle.
Prospect Cottage links to other instances
of the queer bucolic: the floral fantasia of Jean
Genet’s film Un chant d’amour (1950), or the cross-
dressing idyll of Casa Susanna in upstate New
York, a haven for transvestites and transwomen
seeking weekends away in the 1950s and 60s.
We talk often, and rightly, of the significance
of urban nightlife spaces to queer living but
here is another kind of lineage written in
material space. Such sites are important not
only as relics but as resources: they are queer
engines, powerful, sophisticated and generative
technologies of difference and creation.
This is why the new campaign’s most
exciting aspect might be its planned residency
programme, enabling the place to be lived
in again. At the Slade launch event, Tilda
Swinton pointed out that what is at stake
is not merely the preservation of beauty for
posterity but the imperative “to resuscitate and
ensure the continued vibrational existence
of a living battery”. A saved Prospect Cottage
will be a site not only of loving pilgrimage
but of utopian production – an escape
house for the future, a hope machine.
“My mind keeps floating back to
Dungeness,” Jarman once wrote from his
hospital bed. “There are no walls or fences.
My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.”
Find out about the campaign to save
PHOTOGRAPHY © HOWARD SOOLEYProspect Cottage at artfund.org/prospect Catchy hooks: Gwenno and Georgia Ellery performing the score for Bait at BFI Southbank
bit of singing and a bit of playing”, she utilised
records already in her collection to create
an atmospheric take on Cornish coastal life.
These included a rare 1970 collection called
Sounds Like West Cornwall: “I was going to go
down to Newlyn fish market to record all the
sounds, but it turns out that’s on the record!”
As well as adding delay and effects to
50-year-old soundscapes, she reimagined an
old fishing-chant, making it the backbone of
one of the songs she wrote for the project. She
created a song for the end of the film, in Cornish,
with a title that translates as ‘Waves’. “There’s
a spiritual depth to people’s relationship with
the sea in Cornwall and I was trying to evoke a
sort of sea goddess, really.” That song also took
inspiration from one of movie music’s greats:
Ennio Morricone and his sweeping, symphonic
soundtrack for Franco Rubartelli’s 1971 Veruschka,
a documentary about the titular German model.
Though she tried to not veer too far from
Jenkin’s original drone-heavy, minimalist
score, one of Gwenno’s main aims was to
try to emphasise the stories of the women
in the film. “Because it’s a very masculine
film, I was quite interested in trying to
find the feminine energy,” she says.
One of those female characters, the defiant
teenager Katie, is played by Georgia Ellery, who
is also a member of London indie bands Black
Country New Road and Jockstrap; she joined
Gwenno on stage for the performance to play
violin and sing harmonies. Since they had
had only two rehearsals, Ellery and Gwenno’s
performance involved a lot of improvisation.
“It’s different every time – there’s a freedom
to it,” Gwenno says. “That’s more fun too,
because you’re responding to each other.”
The Southbank screening was a one-off,
but Gwenno thinks the chances of further
outings for her score are high. “I’m definitely
looking forward to playing more shows...”By Leonie Cooper
When Mark Jenkin, director of last year’s
blackly comic DIY Cornish fishing drama
Bait, was asked by the BFI if he would be up for
recreating his self-composed score live at a special
screening, his response was an immediate no.
But he knew a woman who could: electronic-
pop singer-songwriter Gwenno. “The idea of
being up there trying to recreate it gives me a
panic attack,” he says while introducing the
Gwenno-assisted version of the film on a chilly
January evening at BFI Southbank in London.
Gwenno was Jenkin’s first and only choice
to take on the challenge, not least because
her acclaimed 2018 album Le Kov was written
entirely in Cornish. It seemed to mirror
Bait’s narrative about a traditional heritage
at odds with an influx of tone-deaf English
tourists who neither understand nor care
about local customs or the community of the
small fishing village where they holiday.
“I had a real sense of what Mark was going
for,” Gwenno says. “It didn’t feel like something
alien or being commissioned to do something
you have to learn about.” She was asked to take
part only six weeks before the event, but was
more prepared than she realised. For a score
she describes as “a mixture of a DJ set with aCORNISH RHAPSODY
Thanks to a collaboration with
the musician Gwenno, Mark
Jenkin’s acclaimed fishing drama
Bait has achieved a new depthSOUNDTRACKS‘ There’s a spiritual depth to
people’s relationship with the sea
in Cornwall and I was trying
to evoke a sort of sea goddess’