Tilda Swinton is campaigning to save Derek Jarman’s Dungeness home
Tilda Swinton was among a group of leading cultural figures who this morning called on the public to support Art Fund’s crowdfunding appeal to save Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman’s home in Dungeness, for the public.
Swinton was joined by artists including Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Michael Craig-Martin, Isaac Julien and Wolfgang Tillmans at the launch event, held at Jarman’s alma mater, the Slade School of Arts. The appeal – for £3.5 million worth of funding by 31 March 2020 – would ensure the preservation of his extraordinary home and garden for future generations.
Jarman, a film-maker, artist, poet, gardener and activist, bought Prospect Cottage – a former fisherman’s house on a shingle beach in Kent – and turned it into a creative retreat where he and his collaborators could make art. After his death from AIDS in 1994, he entrusted it to the care of his partner, Keith Collins, who, prior to his death in 2018, expressed a wish for the cottage to be saved.
Swinton, who starred in Jarman’s 1990 film The Garden, set in Prospect Cottage, spoke movingly of her enduring friendship and creative exchange with the film-maker. Recalling the day when the pair first set eyes on the property during a shoot in Kent, she described his instant connection with it and “the pleasure he took in transforming this modest cottage into the Tardis he created”. She went on to emphasise its significance to Jarman as a “living thing, a toolbox for his work” and called for the conservation of this “treasure that might otherwise be lost to our cultural landscape”.
Maria Balshaw, the director of Tate, echoed Swinton’s fond sentiments towards Jarman, describing him as “tirelessly inventive, an uncategorisable individual, one of those rare people who can be said to have changed the way we think about art, and indeed the world”; while the artist Tacita Dean warned that “if we let [Prospect Cottage] go, we will regret it for an eternity”.
While a number of major grants and private donations have already taken the campaign halfway towards its target, public support is needed to raise the full sum required to maintain free access to the cottage’s gardens, host guided visits of the interior and launch a series of artist residencies, with Creative Folkestone overseeing the long-term running of the site and Tate Britain making pieces from Jarman’s extensive archive available for public access. Stephen Deuchar, the director of Art Fund, said that it was “imperative we came together to save the cottage, its contents and its extraordinary garden as a source of creative inspiration for everyone”.
Donations can be made at www.artfund.org/prospect. Rewards including limited-edition prints and stickers created by leading artists are offered in return for donations to the appeal.
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