Visual Art
The visual artworks and films of Derek Jarman, on show in Australia for the first time at UNSW Galleries, are a tribute to his vital sense of beauty and catastrophe. By Neha Kale.
Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days at UNSW Galleries
The colour on the screen is radiant. It glows lighter, then darker, reaching new hemispheres of intensity. The colour pulls me forward, plunging me into nothingness as if I were lying on the grass and looking at the sky. A man’s voice, velvety and deep, recalls hearing about the war in Sarajevo, being knocked over by a wayward cyclist, the news from his doctor that he’s found lesions in his retina. He can see blue flashes, he tells me, a blue butterfly swaying on a cornflower. “Blue of my heart, blue of my dreams,” he says. “Slow blue love of delphinium day.”
The delphinium, of course, is a symbol of joy. Derek Jarman, the queer British artist, writer and filmmaker, famously grew them in his garden at Dungeness, the windswept headland off the coast of Kent, where a beach strewn with shingles unfolds in the shadow of a nuclear power station.
Delphinium Days is an elegant exhibition at UNSW Galleries, originally shown at Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand, and the first major presentation of Jarman’s work in Australia. It includes an image of the artist’s garden taken by his friend and collaborator, the photographer Howard Sooley: Prospect Cottage, a house of storybook proportions, sits in a bleached-bone landscape. Flowers, newly planted, are patches of purple and red.
I pause in front of Prospect (1991) on the next wall, one of my favourite works in the gallery. In this painting, barely bigger than an A4 sheet of paper, restless strokes in a thick impasto conjure life in motion, the field poppies and viper’s bugloss that thrive in parched soil – beauty seeping like blood through broken earth, persisting despite conditions we perceive as inhospitable.
The delphinium, I later learn, is also toxic, capable of killing humans. That its meaning shifts feels fitting. On screen, the blue fades and the man’s voice intones: “I place a delphinium, blue, upon your grave.”
I thought I knew the life and work of Derek Jarman: his father was born in New Zealand and was a decorated RAF officer; Jarman grew up in Middlesex, with stints in Pakistan and Rome; studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, before going on to make experimental films – Sebastiane, Caravaggio – with a band of collaborators such as the musician Simon Fisher Turner and the actor Tilda Swinton; moved to Dungeness in 1987, after being diagnosed with HIV.
He wrote Blue (1993) – his final film – when he was losing his vision. Watching it now, the lozenge of colour hovering and floating in front of me, it’s impossible to be unmoved. The work was simultaneously broadcast on Channel 4 and BBC Radio 3 and is an elegy to lost friends. “My heart’s memory turns to you,” the narrator says. “David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul.” He goes on to describe the 30 pills a day that are keeping him alive, and their cocktail of side effects. DHPG, the drug administered via drip twice a day, causes “fever, rash, abnormal liver function, infection, malaise, loss of balance, psychosis”.
Jarman was among the first public figures to disclose his HIV-positive status and an outspoken critic of section 28, the legislation enshrined in the United Kingdom in the late ’80s that banned local authorities from “promoting homosexuality”. He railed against the Victorian morality, the emphasis on the individual rather than the collective that was popularised by Margaret Thatcher. Four decades on, as neoliberalism rages and the world splinters, growing more hostile and crueller, the ideas he was fighting for have never felt more prescient.
In the exhibition’s first space is a series of Jarman’s Black Paintings – a reference to Goya – made during the last eight years of his life. They combine tar, broken glass and flotsam scavenged from the beach in Dungeness: a squashed can, a toy plane. In God Bless American Express (1987), bullet casings appear alongside a traveller’s cheque, violence inextricable from capital, bodies deemed worthy only if sanctioned by the state.
In the next room a wall plays host to three of the artist’s Evil Queen paintings, some of his last works. In one, the words “Drop Dead” emerge from an explosion of paint, splattered on the canvas with a wild and frenetic energy. In front of it, you can feel the force of the work’s making. Nearby, Arse Injected Death Syndrome (1993), likely a tabloid slur skewered here by the artist, evokes a dark double meaning: sex and death, play and fury, always swirling together in one universe.
At the entrance of Delphinium Days is The Dream of a Mirror, a shimmering video work by the artist Mel Deerson, filmed at Dungeness and commissioned for the exhibition. The show takes a reverent tone. The paintings are moodily lit, arranged in tidy rows. Alongside the photographs of Jarman’s garden is a body of images titled Saint Derek. They show the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an order of queer “nuns” known for their LGBTQIA+ activism, canonising Jarman on the beach and in front of the Black Paintings. Dappled light, refracted by the broken glass, pools on the ground like a fallen halo.
In spending time with Jarman’s works, it’s not their aura that mesmerises me but their sense of aliveness. I’m pulled into their orbit. I listen to Modern Nature, Jarman’s gardening diaries, on repeat and their pointillist attention is addictive. I see flowers everywhere. Colours feel more vivid. Jarman plants roses, an old varietal grown since the 12th century. He worries about the greenhouse effect. He watches the sun sink behind the nuclear power station and I’m struck again by this intertwining of beauty and catastrophe, so at odds with our modern impulse to either confront the world or retreat from it – but never both.
One of the best works in Delphinium Days is a Super 8 film, My Very Beautiful Movie (1974), filmed on New York’s Fire Island, a site of queer liberation. A figure moves through the landscape, watching the waves on the beach. In a gorgeous scene, the dusk rippling orange and pink, he finds and holds up a starfish.
That weekend, I go swimming in the ocean. I’m thinking about Blue, how even as the viewer is faced with blankness, the narrator’s voice becomes more urgent, his descriptions more intense, as if in the absence of one sense, another compensates. In the water, blueness everywhere, it feels less like an elegy and more like an invitation to surrender to the body’s fragility by finding the beauty that sustains it – and doing what we can to hold on.
Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days is showing at UNSW Galleries, Sydney, until May 4.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 29, 2025 as "Feeling blue".
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