Conceived as a reader, this volume includes essays by cultural critic Elisabeth Lebovici, Claire Le Restif, Fiona Corridan, garden historian Marco Martella, and journalist and activist Cy Lecerf Maulpoix, a comprehensive interview with Jarman’s collaborator James Mackay, as well as testimonies—among other Jarman’s friends—by actress Tilda Swinton and musician Simon Fisher Turner, and an illustrated chronology.

Jarman’s militant Queer Paintings series (1992), his tender Super8 films from the mid-1970s, his emotional assemblages made at Prospect Cottage (Dungeness, Kent) whose cultivation was both a form of therapy and a metaphor for his own survival after he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, are considered together to focus on Jarman as a visual artist—a painter and an assemblagist—and how his artistic practice can be understood as a catalyst for his manifold activities and visions.

Published following Derek Jarman’s exhibition Dead Souls Whisper (1986–1993) at Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, in 2021.

The artist, filmmaker, writer, musician and gay rights activist Derek Jarman (1942–1994) powerfully marked twentieth-century British culture. This exhibition, with some seventy works, highlights his practice as a painter and assemblagist. It focuses on the last part of his life, starting at the time of his HIV-positive diagnosis. This period coincides with the creation of his legendary garden Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, whose cultivation was both a form of therapy and a metaphor for his own survival.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Evil Queen by Derek Jarman at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 1994.

Artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s last set of 17 paintings are a powerful testimony to the way he dealt with his HIV status, his sexuality, with homophobia in the press and their manipulation of the AIDS epidemic, and to his confrontation with his own mortality.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.