Future Uncertain for Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage

In 2015, curator Douglas Fogle and his wife visited filmmaker Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage, "a historic Victorian fisherman’s hut located on the Kentish coastal village of Dungeness amid the miles and miles of shingle beach that form what some people claim is the only geographical desert found in the United Kingdom." Excerpted on the facade is John Donne's poem, "The Sun Rising" (1633). With Prospect Cottage's future in the balance, Fogle reflects at Artforum:

The heart of this home is its sitting room, whose wall of windows frame the artist’s exquisitely cultivated garden and the surrounding melancholy landscape with a cinematic reach. It was here that Jarman spent his afternoons as his illness progressed, taking in the sun while writing and contemplating. Sitting on Jarman’s sofa and looking out through this window, I couldn’t help but think of both Blue and Yves Klein. Klein saw monochrome painting as an “open window to freedom, as the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of color.” Jarman’s window frames another kind of freedom, the endless life-affirming possibility that he found in the art of gardening. “The garden is the landscape,” his friend Howard Sooley once wrote. “It ends at the horizon.”

Two years after the death of [Jarman's companion] Keith Collins, Prospect Cottage is now in danger of being lost. Tilda Swinton, a longtime collaborator of Jarman’s, is leading a campaign through Art Fund to raise £3,500,000 (roughly $4,529,250) by March 31, 2020, to save Prospect Cottage and its archive from private sale and preserve the grounds as a residency retreat for artists, writers, gardeners, academics, activists, filmmakers, and others. I cannot imagine a more fitting trajectory for this creative sanctuary. If this plan comes to fruition, Prospect Cottage will become not a memorial encased in amber, but an active memory. Not an ossified monument, but a breathing testament to a life still awaiting future collaborators. On parting Prospect Cottage, we looked back across the shingle garden to the facade of the house on which Jarman had installed, in hand-carved wooden typography, excerpts from John Donne’s 1633 lovers’ ode “The Sun Rising.” Its final couplet forms a kind of mission statement:

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

The full piece is at Artforum.