![]() Inside, a selection of Jarman’s energetic impasto paintings hang alongside bricolage works of found objects and a journal left open on the desk next to a little lead model of a house. Visitors enter the show through an antechamber lined with Dungeness shingle, where a panoramic photo mural of the landscape covers the walls and a solitary driftwood post emerges from the gravel, before entering a re-creation of the cottage’s hallway and study. Until that time comes, prying eyes can be sated by the Garden Museum’s exhibition. ![]() Plans are in the works for a permanent public programme that will include residencies for artists, academics, writers, film-makers and gardeners, along with small tours by appointment. After a period of uncertainty over its fate, the house and garden were saved for the nation in March this year, following a £3.5m crowdfunding campaign led by the Art Fund. After his death, Jarman’s companion, Keith Collins, carefully maintained the property for 20 years, until his own death in 2018. As Jarman put it (giving the exhibition its title): “My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.” The result is an awkward ballet of curiosity and deference: nosey visitors gingerly wander among Jarman’s plants and driftwood sculptures, gradually gravitating towards the cottage, without wanting to get too close, lest the net curtains start twitching. ![]() Regulations in the protected nature reserve mean that fences are mostly forbidden, so property boundaries remain blurred. Those who have visited Dungeness will be familiar with the very un-English prospect of encountering a private garden without a fence. Since he died of an Aids-related illness in 1994, his cottage and garden have become a site of pilgrimage for art students, architects and garden designers, but the house has never been open to the public, which makes this exhibition all the more welcome. Jarman was one of the most important artists and gay rights activists of his generation, making groundbreaking avant-garde films such as Sebastiane, Caravaggio and Jubilee that garnered plaudits for their unabashed homoerotic power. It is one of the strangest, most magical garden scenes in the world – made no less so, back in the 90s, by the sight of Jarman in a hooded djellaba, pottering about among the blooms. The boxy hulk of a nuclear power station looms in the background, emitting a distant hum. Driftwood totems rise above shaggy tufts of sea kale, while talismanic strings of pebbles dangle from rusting iron posts, above the metal balls of fishing floats emerging from clumps of gorse. Approaching the black-tarred silhouette of Prospect Cottage, as you crunch your way across the otherworldly shingle desert on the tip of the Kent coast, you encounter a series of enigmatic stone circles bursting with red and yellow poppies. ![]() “People thought I was building a garden for magical purposes,” Jarman said at the time, “a white witch out to get the nuclear power station.” W hen the director and artist Derek Jarman began making his garden on the great shingle expanse outside his cottage in Dungeness, local fishermen feared something occult was afoot.
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