Words: Severine Bernard (she/her)
It exemplifies Jarman’s intention to create a piece which, as Dominic tells me, emphasised the ‘complete averageness of the homosexual couple within a culture eager to brand them as abnormal’.
In the upstairs gallery of The Hunterian, just seconds away from the library, lies Digging in Another Time, an exhibition synthesising the photography, painting, film, and sculpture of the English mixed media artist Derek Jarman. I recently had the privilege of speaking to the gallery’s curator of contemporary art, Dominic Paterson, about Jarman’s influences and the thematic continuities present in his artwork.
Upon entering the space, my gaze immediately flits to the archival footage of Jarman’s 1989 exhibition, installed at Glasgow’s Third Eye Center (now the CCA), being projected onto the wall. The CCA is currently a hot topic in the Glasgow art scene, having just secured 3 further years of funding after recently closing, but Dominic’s comment that ‘aside from The Hunterian, there are very few institutions that know whether they’ll exist in 5 years’ rings eerily true as I consider this recent news.
Whilst we talk, onscreen Jarman’s partner Keith Collins ducks into the gallery to take his place in a bed constructed there. Here is where Collins and another man will lie, pretending to ignore the homophobic tabloid headlines pasted onto the wall. Collins’s lateness and his shy smile convey an embarrassment captured on video for eternity, transgressing the line between performance art and reality. Yet to the audience of both the original exhibition and to me, who currently watches them watch Collins, it exemplifies Jarman’s intention to create a piece which, as Dominic tells me, emphasised the ‘complete averageness of the homosexual couple within a culture eager to brand them as abnormal’.
Next my interest is captured by Landscape with Sandbars (1967), an acrylic and collage piece. Painted during the early stages of Jarman’s career, it anticipates the artist’s enamourment with the Kent Coast that would come to form the basis of much of his later work. It’s rapidly becoming clear that rather than following a distinctive chronology ‘this exhibition thinks both forward and back, dissolving the threads of time’ by considering work from both the beginning and end of Jarman’s prolific career. The effect is a charmingly disorientating one.
The exhibition pushes boundaries further with its inclusion of a plethora of commissions from 6 contemporary artists. On my right hangs a work by Matthew Arthur Williams: a photograph captured in the original Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, referencing video footage of the queer composer Julius Eastman, also discovered in the CCA’s archive. This commission in particular reiterates the importance of democratising arts spaces by permitting the viewer a rare glimpse into a building normally inaccessible to the public.
Turning to my left, I find myself peering into an early script for Blue (1993), Jarman’s final film before he died of AIDS-related complications. It’s a script more akin to a sketchbook, showing a clear disregard for the conventions of script writing, and crammed with dialogue between Jarman and others including Tilda Swinton, meticulously written and traced over.
From here I am guided to the other side of the gallery where Andrew Black’s paintings adorn one wall, and Jarman’s Black Paintings the other. I’m particularly drawn to Message from the Cesspit (1987). It’s a playful reworking of the homophobic comments made by James Anderton (Chief Constable of Manchester during the 80’s) and presents Jarman as ‘unconcerned by moralising, and instead driven to action by the emotional truths he felt he needed to tell’. To me, this piece, more than any other, coaxes a new generation of artists and activists to create controversial art.
At the end of the hall, enshrined in their glass cabinet, are James Mackay’s polaroids documenting the set of The Garden. Beside them is a partitioned space, segregated by a curtain, which transports me into Jarman’s cinematic universe. Scenes from The Garden are broadcast alongside a film cut by Luke Fowler where Jarman interviews another HIV+ man. These pieces further amplify Jarman’s urgency to create work that positively responded to the AIDs crisis and countered media hysteria.
My tour may have come to an end but the show’s not over yet. Dominic informs me that Jade de Montserrat will be creating a performance piece which will take place at the end of the exhibition. It’s a response to both Jarman’s work on landscape and to the film Springtime in an English Village, a propaganda film created by the colonial film unit to distribute among the commonwealth countries. In addition to this, The Hunterain will be collaborating with the GFT every 2nd Sunday from mid-march to screen Blue, The Last of England, The Garden and Caravaggio respectively, as well as a selection of Jarman’s short films.
Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature can be found in the upstairs gallery of the Hunterian Art Gallery until 04/05/2025.
