Sight&Sound - 04.2020

12 | Sight&Sound | April 2020

terrain was also some place like home. It’s where

Jarman prepared and made work, entertained

friends and lovers, surveyed, plotted, dreamed

and despaired. It’s where his companion and

collaborator Keith Collins cared intimately for

him and where, when he was allowed out of Barts

hospital in the months before his death in 1994,

he tried to be. Following Collins’s own passing

in 2018, this fragile and unlikely site became

newly precarious, at risk of sale, dismemberment

and erasure. A new campaign by Art Fund,

Creative Folkestone and Tate aims to raise £3.

million to bring the site into public ownership.

To spend time there is an extraordinary

privilege. It’s quite spacious, sturdily insulated

against the wind, brimming with beauty,

life, wit and learning. Light pours in. Art is

everywhere, not least Jarman’s own: anguished,

violently coloured paintings against bigotry;

captivating installations of weathered wood,

smooth stone and aged metal; playfully placed

fairy guardians and buzzsaw crucifixions.

An assemblage of He-Man going down on

Venus sits on a medieval-panelled dresser; a worn

sage-green sofa looks on to an inadvertently

homoerotic poster pilfered from the Rome

subway. On the walls are pieces by Maggi

Hambling, John Maybury, Angus McBean, Gus

Van Sant, Richard Hamilton, Robert Medley.

The painting room still has its pots of brushes.

Props and awards sit next to metal cocks and

tiaras, volumes on magick near a Ladybird book

of nuclear power. It feels lived-in, comfortable,

By Ben Walters

Prospect Cottage, the filmmaker, artist and activist

Derek Jarman wrote, was “the last of a long line

of ‘escape houses’ I started building as a child” –

improvised bolt-holes of grass and sand, metal and

wood, spaces at once found and made, enabling

refuge from the existing and creation of the new.

Prospect Cottage was the end of this line; it

could also feel like the end of the world. Tar-

black with bright yellow windows, this hardy

wooden fisherman’s hut was built in 1900 on the

sprawling, spare shingle expanse of Dungeness,

on the Kent coast. Across the shingle, to the

east, it faces a band of road and a ribbon of sea;

to the south, the nuclear power plant lowers

on the horizon. This spur of England gets more

wind and sun than the rest and when buffeted

by a hurricane or an explosion at the plant –

both of which happened soon after Jarman

bought the place in 1986 and moved in – it felt

apocalyptic. There were other inauspicious

intimations at the time: homophobia and

philistinism were ascendant and Jarman

had recently been diagnosed with HIV.

The beauty he accomplished in Dungeness,

then, was remarkable. He stripped out the chintz

and added warm, chunky brutalist furniture, a

sun-room extension and a Donne poem on the

cottage’s north face, letters in Jarman’s hand

rendered in plywood. And, preposterously, he

started making a garden there, out of dog rose

and gorse and opium poppies, driftwood and

lichen and foot-high hunks of flint. The front

garden was ordered and geometric, circles and

squares; the back was scattered and wild, rusted

metal jags and stubbornly spreading bushes.

Jarman adored its resinous, honeyed and acrid

scents and its summer colours, “like a packet of

liquorice all sorts”. The place was a surprise but

not a miracle: it didn’t deny its harsh conditions

but revealed their potential. “So many weeds,”

Jarman observed, “are spectacular flowers.”

Prospect Cottage, he thought, was like

Dorothy’s house dropped in Oz. But its alien

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

RUSHES

A new campaign hopes to preserve

Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage

in Kent as both a memorial

and an inspiration to artists

CAMPAIGN

It’s where Jarman prepared

and made work, entertained

friends and lovers, surveyed,

plotted, dreamed and despaired

Shingle-minded dedication: Prospect Cottage

APPEAL

RISING PROSPECTS

A new campaign – launched at the Slade art

school in London on 22 January by Art Fund,

Creative Folkestone and Tate – aims to raise

£3.5 million by 31 March to secure the site

of Prospect Cottage and, crucially, support

its productive powers. As well as archiving

Dungeness-related materials and works, the

scheme will bring the cottage and garden into

public ownership, secure their restoration and

upkeep, and support residencies by artists,

filmmakers, writers, gardeners, academics,

activists and others. The scheme will also enable

members of the public to look inside the cottage

for the first time. Major grants have already

raised more than £1.5 million; a crowdfunding

campaign seeking the rest offers rewards for

donations, ranging from a badge-and-sticker

set by Jeremy Deller for £25 to a set of prints by

Isaac Julien for £1,250. Other prints come from

Michael Craig-Martin, Tacita Dean, Howard

Sooley and Wolfgang Tillmans, while costume

designer Sandy Powell is planning to auction the

outfit she wore to this year’s Baftas and Oscars,

signed by a host of A-list awards nominees.