Black Painting
DEREK JARMAN
DEREK JARMAN, 1982 -1991
Derek Jarman trawled the shingles of Dungeness Beach, in the shadow of the Nuclear Power Plant, picking up lost objects. He did the same in flea markets in London. Jetsam and detritus became his inspiration for his series of Black Paintings. Using the same tar his cottage was coated in as the base, he created these assemblages as he began to die from HIV. They can be read as Memento Mori, indeed some can even be seen as abstract headstones, but they are not about the inevitability of just Jarman’s death. They are about the collective, the past owners of these lost objects, and the uniting of them together in something literally dead - tar. So they are about the inevitability of dying but too the will to live. Jarman saved objects and gave them life, he joined together the rejected to create a unified new.