SCFZ

Prof Robert Mills (UCL) presents his keynote paper 'Apocalypse Then: Derek Jarman’s Revelation and the Middle Ages' at The Courtauld Institute of Art as part of 'Imagining the Apocalypse' conference organised by Dr Edwin Coomasaru, October 2019.

https://youtu.be/J9DRBsS154Q

Bob Mills is Professor of Medieval Studies and Head of the History of Art Department. Between 2015 and 2018 he directed qUCL, UCL's LGBTQ research network. Bob's books include Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (2005), Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (2015) and Derek Jarman's Medieval Modern (2018). Bob is currently working on questions of animality and sovereignty in medieval art.

Derek Jarman: Radical Traditionalist
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/gre ... rs/jarman/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelatio ... ivine_Love

Revelations of Divine Love is a medieval book of Christian mystical devotions. It was written between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by Julian of Norwich, about whom almost nothing is known. It is the earliest surviving example of a book in the English language known to have been written by a woman.

REVELATIONS:
1/ Julian sees "red blood trickling down from under the Crown of Thorns" on a crucifix. She comprehends that the Holy Trinity is understood when Jesus appears. She sees his mother Mary as a young girl, and comprehends her nature. Jesus shows Julian "a little thing, the size of a hazelnut" as a sign of his love.

"And in þis he shewed me a lytil thyng þe quantite of a hasyl nott. lyeng in þe pawme of my hand as it had semed. and it was as rownde as eny ball. I loked þer upon wt þe eye of my vnderstondyng. and I þought what may þis be. and it was answered generally thus. It is all þat is made. I merueled howe it myght laste. for me þought it myght sodenly haue fall to nought for lytyllhed. & I was answered in my vnderstondyng. It lastyth & euer shall for god louyth it. and so hath all thyng his begynning by þe loue of god. In this lytyll thyng I sawe thre propertees. The fyrst is. þt god made it. þe secunde is þet god louyth it. & þe þrid is. þat god kepith it."

And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, it seemed, and it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and I thought, 'What may this be?' And it was answered generally thus: 'It is all that is made.' I wondered how it could last, for I thought it might suddenly fall to nothing for little cause. And I was answered in my understanding: 'It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it; and so everything has its beginning by the love of God.' In this little thing I saw three properties; the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God keeps it.

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter V "Westminster Cathedral Treasury, MS 4"

flip wrote: ↑Tue Oct 19, 2021 6:25 pm how much more time

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195 ... n_s_Garden

This book is Derek Jarman's own record of how this garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs taken since 1991 by his friend and photographer Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages and at every season of the year. Photographs from all angles reveal the garden's complex geometrical plan, its magical stone circles and its beautiful and bizarre sculptures.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/j ... eum-london

Surrounded by poppies, sea kale and a nuclear power station, the late director’s otherworldly cottage and garden in Kent have been saved for the nation. And now there’s good news for anyone who can’t wait to see inside



When the director and artist Derek Jarman began making his garden on the great shingle expanse outside his cottage in Dungeness, local fishermen feared something occult was afoot. “People thought I was building a garden for magical purposes,” Jarman said at the time, “a white witch out to get the nuclear power station.”

...

Obsessed with flowers since he was a boy, Jarman dreamed of a magical rose garden emerging from the arid shingle. His parents had given him the 1926 illustrated manual, Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them, for his fourth birthday, and he spent his youth making little gardens, winning a prize at boarding school for his plot. Prospect Cottage was the first time he had the chance to make an entire garden of his own from scratch, and he began with 30 rose plants, brought to the coast from a nursery in Kensington. As Collins wrote: “Derek imagined himself surrounded by a forest of impenetrable thorns, eventually hacked down by a true-hearted, handsome prince.”

Most of the roses withered. Jarman turned instead to native plants – sea kale, wild peas, viper’s bugloss, teasels and sea holly. As Sooley recalls, he would use driftwood sticks to mark out the delicate purple shoots of the sea kale, “hidden under the shingle like long-abandoned land mines”. The sticks would then be adorned with with flotsam scavenged on his daily beach-combing walks, from chains and anchors to sea-smoothed bricks and sun-bleached crab shells. And so the garden grew, plants sprouting where the wind blew their seeds. Jarman occasionally intervened, writes Sooley, “waving dried seed heads over an area the might benefit from a foxglove or yellow horned poppy,” like some robed alchemist casting a spell, and marking out meandering paths “devised around the needs of plants, and not the other way around”.

...

As the film-maker said towards the end of his life: “Every flower is a triumph. I’ve had more fun from this place than I’ve had with anything else in my life. I should have been a gardener.”