Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman's Modern Nature
Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman's Modern Nature
Date: Saturday 02 November 2024 - Sunday 04 May 2025
Time: 10:00 - 17:00
Venue: Hunterian Art Gallery
Category: Hunterian
An exhibition of works by internationally renowned filmmaker, artist, stage designer and diarist Derek Jarman, shown alongside commissioned responses from contemporary artists.
Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature is inspired by Jarman’s diary entries from 1989 which detail his performance-installation at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre, his planting of his acclaimed garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness and his work on the film The Garden.
Alongside works by Jarman, the exhibition features the work of six contemporary artists: Andrew Black, Luke Fowler, Jade de Montserrat, Tom Walker, Matthew Arthur Williams and Sarah Wood. Funding from Creative Scotland has enabled the commissioning of newly created works which will make connections to Jarman’s work through radical readings of landscape and place, inspirational experiment with mediums, importance and contribution to queer history.
The Hunterian will stage an exciting events programme related to the included works and themes, including a live theatre production of Jarman's final film Blue at Glasgow's Tramway.
Derek Jarman (1942-94) was an English artist, filmmaker, costume and stage designer, writer, poet, gardener, and gay rights activist. He studied English and Art at King's College London, followed by four years at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Jarman was one of the very few public figures in the UK to be openly HIV-positive, having been diagnosed in 1986. His illness prompted him to establish his home Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, where he wrote his celebrated memoir Modern Nature.
Andrew Black is an artist and filmmaker based in Glasgow. He makes experimental documentaries about individuals, communities and landscapes, and the narratives and desires that tie them together. Grounded by oral histories, his work foregrounds aspects of rural life that tell of communal and cooperative forms of society, protest and dissent. He was shortlisted for the 2023 Jarman Award and was the 2021 recipient of the Margaret Tait Award. His commissioned film On Clogger Lane premiered at Glasgow Film Theatre in February 2023, was exhibited at The Tetley, Leeds, and at LUX, London in 2024. His work has shown at CCA Glasgow, Dundee Contemporary Arts and Centre Clark, Montreal.
Luke Fowler lives and works in Glasgow. Fowler questions the style and political implications of conventional modes of documentary through a varied practice which encompasses film, sound, installation and photography. He is concerned with finding new ways to meaningfully engage with marginal cultural figures, spaces and archive materials through the medium of 16mm film. His moving image works have charted an alternative history of Britain as well as considering significant international musicians and artists – revisiting the work of Margaret Tait, R. D. Laing, Patrick Cowley, and Brunhild Ferrari, amongst others. He was nominated for The Turner Prize in 2012 and received the inaugural Derek Jarman Award in 2008.
Jade de Montserrat is an artist concerned with challenging structures of care in institutions and with the intersection of gender, race, class, and colonialism, often in the context of life in rural communities. Dr. de Montserrat was the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship supporting her PhD and the development of her work from her Black Diasporic perspective in the North of England. She works through performance, drawing, painting, film, installation, sculpture, print and text. de Montserrat is a Tutor at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London.
Tom Walker lives and works in Leeds. A graduate of the MFA programme at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, Walker engaged with the archiving of Derek Jarman’s work during a 2017 Creative Lab residency at CCA Glasgow. This was part of his larger project of investigating the differing modes of organisation and presentation at work within counter and queer culture in post-Stonewall society, examining political and aesthetic responses to both times of crisis and celebration.
Matthew Arthur Williams is an artist, photographer and DJ living and working in Glasgow. He completed his BA Photography at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2012. Williams frequently works with installations incorporating the photographic medium, moving image and sound. He was awarded the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship in February 2024 and nominated for Film London Jarman Award in 2023. He sits on the board of trustees for The Bothy Project and is Lecturer in Fine Art Photography at the Glasgow School of Art.
Sarah Wood is an artist who works with found objects, particularly still and moving images, as an act of reclamation and re-interrogation. She works mainly with documentary images to interrogate the relationship between the narrating of history and individual memory. Wood works with artists’ film as a curator. With Selina Robertson she co-founded Club des Femmes, a positive female space for the re-examination of ideas through art.