This exhibition at the Garden Museum discovered the story of Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness—the first to focus on Jarman’s love of gardening and the role of the garden in his life and work.
Displaying works of art and film alongside personal artefacts borrowed from inside the cottage (not open to the public), My garden’s boundaries are the horizon offered a rare opportunity to experience this precious work of art, garden, and life. Paintings and sculptures from throughout Jarman’s career, on loan from The Keith Collins Will Trust, showed how gardens and plants spilled into all elements of his creativity. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1986, he described painting as “my secret garden… an escape.” His black paintings of the 1980s—tarred and embedded with found objects from the beach and garden—were an emotive response to his HIV diagnosis; his colourful early-1990s landscapes evoked the joy and beauty he experienced in the garden.
Jarman acquired Prospect Cottage, a fisherman’s shack on the Dungeness shingle, for £32,000 after spotting it for sale while filming on the beach with Tilda Swinton. Diagnosed with HIV on 22 December 1986, he resolved to “get as much out of life as possible” and began creating a garden. The only contemporary garden made without a boundary, it stood beside a nuclear power station; shingle, wind and salt created an extreme version of “right plant for the right place.” It evoked resilience and the uplifting sense that if a garden could be made there—on a stony beach overshadowed by a power station—it could be made on any site, however small and vulnerable.
Exhibition designed by Jeremy Herbert
The Garden, Derek Jarman, 1990, Basilisk Communications Studio Bankside, Derek Jarman, 1972, LUMA Foundation
Free
