Elise Lammer

Queering Nature: Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, on the relationship of gardening and queer activism

Spring Semester 2023

Shortly after being diagnosed with HIV in 1986, the British artist, filmmaker, author and gay rights activist Derek Jarman (UK, 1942-1994) moved from London to Dungeness on the south east coast of England. From 1987 onwards, he developed Prospect Cottage, a garden and cottage where he lived and worked during the last seven years of his life.

Building upon Aaron Betsky’s definition of a “queer space”, and drawing on Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands’s political approach to queer ecology, I argue that Jarman’s garden offers an exemplary template to discuss a new approach on the relationship between ecology and queerness. Titled by Jarman ‘Prospect ‘Cottage, such “queer space” in fact provided the locus where—in the midst of a deadly pandemic and under a fierce anti gay political climate—emancipation could be envisioned and hoped for. In the framework of this research, I propose to investigate the queering of nature as a tool for liberation encompassing all natural forces, dead or lively; human and non human. Jarman’s home and garden—in turn described as place of resistance, a therapy, but also a pharmacopeia—opens up an entirely new realm of interpretation within the field of queer ecology, while possibly filling the dichotomic gap between art and life.

For this research, I use the expanded concept of artistic production, which includes Derek Jarman's poetry, paintings, assemblages and videos in order to support the validity of my arguments. I intend to focus on Jarman’s artistic work ranging from 1986 until his death in 1994, which corresponds to the time spent in and around Prospect Cottage. This includes films, writings, and artworks, as well as the work (most of it preserved until this day) he did in the garden he created. With this research project I argue that the work that Derek Jarman produced during his time at Prospect Cottage went a step further in the materialization of his visionary queer politics, with his garden providing a case for an alternative approach to the intersection of environmental politics and queer theory.

_{credit: Jessy Razafimandimby, O.O.O.O.O., 2020}