WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NEIL BARTLETT 'The life-affirming expression of an artist engaged in living to the full' The TimesSmiling in Slow Motion is Derek Jarman's last journal, stretching from May 1991 until a fortnight before his death in February 1994.
Originally released as a feature film in 1993, the year before the acclaimed artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman's death due to an AIDS-related illness, 'Blue' is a daring work of art. The film - and this book's text - serve as iconoclastic responses to the lack of political engagement with the AIDS crisis. Written poetically and surrealistically, Jarman's text moves through myriad scenes, some banal, others fantastical.
Derek Jarman's Garden is the last book Jarman ever wrote. It is a fitting memorial to a brilliant and greatly loved artist and film maker who, against all odds, made a breathtakingly beautiful garden in the most inhospitable of places - the flat, bleak, often desolate expanse of shingle overlooked by the Dungeness nuclear power station. Here is Jarman's own record of how the garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs by his friend Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages and at every season of the year, revealing the complex geometrical plan, magical stone circles and the beautiful and bizarre scupltures. We also catch glimpses of Jarman at work on the garden.
Derek Jarman worked for more than seven years to complete is feature film based on the life and work of Italian post-Renaissance painter, Caravaggio. This book interprets the film with photographs taken throughout the filming
A divine, meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness.'An essential - urgent - book for the 21st Century' Hans Ulrich ObristWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY OLIVIA LAINGIn 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness.
Conceived of as a 'pharmacopoeia' - an ever-evolving circle of stones, plants and flotsam sculptures all built and grown in spite of the bracing winds and arid shingle - it remains today a site of fascination and wonder. Pharmacopoeia brings together the best of Derek Jarman's writing on nature, gardening and Prospect Cottage.
A meditation on the colour spectrum by the painter, poet and film-maker, Derek Jarman. He explains the use of colour in medieval painting through the Renaissance to the modernists. It also discusses the meaning of colour in literature, science, philosophy, psychology, religion and alchemy.
One of England’s foremost filmmakers, Derek Jarman (1942–1994) wrote and directed several feature films, including Sebastiane, Jubilee, Caravaggio, and Blue, as well as numerous short films and music videos. He was a stage designer, artist, writer, gardener, and an outspoken AIDS and queer rights activist in the UK and the United States. He is the author of several books, among them Modern Nature, available from the University of Minnesota Press.
In non-linear snippets and including photographs of Jarman's artwork, he describes his sexual awakening in post-war England, his early struggles to create and find recognition for his art, and vivid accounts of his friends, lovers, and inspirations.
Published here for the very first time through our House Sparrow Press imprint, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping is Derek Jarman's only piece of narrative fiction. Written in 1971, it is a surreal, fabular, lyrical work - a literary fairytale acid-trip road movie hybrid - the energies and details of which influenced much of his later work across media. The richly poetic story, a cinematic prose quest, tracks the journey of a blind young King and his valet, disguised as beggars, who set out in no particular direction and with no particular purpose. Departing from Fargo, across the frontier of Movietown, along the Superhighway and picnicking on the Lawns of Paradise, they encounter vivid characters like Pierrot, Borgia Ginz and Topaz, an Emperor who 'smiles with the art of mirrors', as well as a Sphinx with 'Silence is Golden' written in her eyes. The story serves as a foundational text, laying out many of the themes, images and styling of Jarman's work in painting, film and design whilst also being haunted by the then emerging ecological crisis in its juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the reckless consumption of modernity. This edition features facsimile images of the story's handwritten drafts from Jarman's archive, a link to an exclusive audio recording of Jarman himself reading the story in full, and is comprehensively informed by a vivid foreword from Philip Hoare, a deeply researched afterword by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen, and a warm memoir by the artist Michael Ginsborg, a close friend of Jarman's throughout the period of the story's writing
