Altarpiece (Will we forever travel into the void?)
2020
Solo Presentation
BIG ART, Zaandam (NL) 
Nuweland Gallery

Altar Piece (Will we forever travel into the void?)
2020
Ink on paper, and brass
Triptych, 372 x 220cm per panel





Altarpiece (Will we forever travel into the void?)
2020
Solo Presentation
BIG ART, Zaandam (NL)
Nuweland Gallery
This work, Derek Jarman, 1994, was produced to commemorate the life of the artist, writer, filmmaker and gay activist, Derek Jarman.


Pearl fishers
In azure seas
Deep waters

[…]

Lost Boys
Sleep forever
In a dear embrace
Salt lips touching

Derek Jarman, 1993


In December of 1986, the artist Derek Jarman was diagnosed as HIV positive. Three years later, he moved to a cottage on the coast of Dungeness, England. Prospect Cottage, as it is called, was a fisherman’s cottage built “eighty years ago at the sea’s edge – one stormy night many years ago waves roared up to the front door threatening to swallow it... Now the sea has retreated leaving bands of shingle,” which both separated and paved Jarman’s way to the shore.

At night they are aglow with futuristic brilliance, lights blaring like the stars that shine over the nearby ocean. It’s a confluence of the natural and the unnatural that could only occur at the sea, constant and yet ever-changing.

Here, Jarman started a garden that will be visited by many people after his death: Slowly the garden acquired a new meaning – the plants struggling against biting winds and Death Valley sun merged with Derek’s struggle with illness, then contrasted with it, as the flowers blossomed while Derek faded.

A year before Jarman’s death in 1994, his film Blue (1993) was released at the Venice Biennale. During the final years of his life, Jarman started losing his sight. He began to see as though through a blue filter. Blue is devoid of images and consists of only a saturated blue screen accompanied by a voiceover and musical soundtrack. The spoken words, written by Jarman, are from “a diaristic and poetic text documenting his AIDS-related illness and impending death at a time that he had become partially blind, his vision often interrupted by blue light.” (Wilson, 2013) It is a film about Jarman’s own experience, and simultaneously a tribute to the artist Yves Klein.

Blue is the universal love in which man bathes. It is the terrestrial paradise.
Derek Jarman, 1993