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Behind the Scenes with Sherre DeLys and her explanation of Jarman's Garden.
Many of you will know that Derek Jarman was an English filmmaker who died in
1994. This piece is an impressionistic rendering of my visit to a unique garden
which he created, and into which he put an extraordinary amount of passion and
physical labour during his long illness. The garden is a jagged garden, at the
edge of the sea. Jarman made his final home here, in a desolate expanse of
shingle (small waterworn stones that lie in layers there). The garden faces the
nuclear power station in Dungeness, Kent. He bought a fisherman's cottage.
At first sight, Dungeness looks an inhospitable place. There are boats and
rusting metal strewn across the landscape. On the afternoon I visited, it was
unusually windless. The tide was going out.
I spent time on the first day walking around the area and sitting in the garden
alone, and as I looked at this strange garden it began to make sense. I could
see that Derek had put Dungeness at right angles. He'd formed circles of
flints, shells and wind-twisted wood -- there was sculpture from old tools,
seashore-rusted metal, and other beachcombed treasures -- there were geometric
plantings of seakale. The garden was a gathering together and then a very
personal re-rendering of the environment.
I decided then that the process of making the program should be similar. I'd
collect sounds of the environment and the materials that make up the
environment there, the stones, the metal tools, etc., and then 'put it at right
angles,' aestheticising it along the way, playing with artifice and
"re-ordering nature." I'd manipulate recorded sounds to form recognisable
melodic and rhythmic patterns. (One thing I admired about Derek as an artist
was his commitment to process, so it felt natural to me to attempt to follow or
reflect his process as a way of making the piece.)
Derek left the garden to his young lover Keith, "to do with as he desires," it
said in the will. Keith left London, and the film world he and Derek shared,
and moved to Prospect Cottage to till the garden. It's been quite a few years
now, and Keith has stayed, tilling the garden, and fishing.
Keith led me through the garden and the cottage.
Keith says Derek wouldn't mind if he bulldozed the garden. He says he's held by
the silence. Very little to interrupt there, just the wind, and the way it
plays on the metal sculptures. (Derek liked things that made a jangle and a
noise.) At times the sound reminds him of Derek's film Edward II, which starts
with the rattle of a jailer's chain.
Gradually Keith's story became also a subject of the piece. I was intrigued,
wondering how long he would stay, so some meanings of gardens -- like time --
emerged, as did sadness, and labours of love, and mystery.
In the lead-up to my visit to the garden, I read Jarman's published diaries,
and found many thoughts which resonated with my notion of what meanings such a
garden, in such an environment, might contain. For example:
"A sadness as deep as the continental shelf washes over me."
"As the light fades, death comes - even for stones."
"This garden has been both Gesthemane and Eden."
So, notions of a paradise garden, or a garden haunted by paradise, became
important. I understood that he was investing the landscape with transcendental
meanings. The landscape was standing in for landscape acting as metonym. I've
previously worked with ideas and sounds of landscape to portray stories which
have lives outside speech, for example journeys through states of
consciousness, as in dreaming or dying. There was a resonance there.
Sadness and time were clearly going to be the real stuff of the piece.
I also read in Derek's diaries that: "Dungeness is to disappear in 100 years
time along with its power station" ... to be swallowed by the sea.
And the piece actually became for me primarily a piece about time -- and what
is a garden, but time?
The seakale all winter is dormant. Keith has become a fisherman, and goes out
on the boats each day. The cottage, for the time being, is returned to a
fisherman's cottage. A poem about time fills the southern wall of the house.
Each day the sun floats up from the sea. In the afternoon it slowly passes
across the garden and the poem on the house. Most evenings the entire crew of
Keith's fishing boat stops, silent, to watch the extraordinary Dungeness
sunset. Thinking of time, and tides, I decided to structure the piece around
the sun's diurnal path ... across the garden, the cottage, the sea. These are
the three sections of the piece, this one being the third.
Back at home, I worked with musician Chris Abrahams, who you will hear
throughout. We decided to juxtapose the complex sounds of nature recorded in
the surrrounds of the garden with extremely pure instrumental sounds. For
example, the complex spectral noise of waves, coupled with the pure tones of
the electric keyboard.
We made reference to Jarman's films. Could we make "Super-8 music" with a
national song of the British Isles which found a resonance in Jarman's notions
of British history, family, and nostalgia? And does it serve the radio
program's diegesis, or does it work more like a film score?
We were mutually inspired by the aesthetics of passing time, by Jarman's love
of artifice, and by the ordering of nature. What if piano mimics the chime of a
clock whose habitual intervals Derek modified? Because, what are the second,
the minute, and the hour, but a painting of time? Can the regular rhythm of
hands at the keyboard pull against the periodic tides? Because what is sound,
but waves?
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