Wednesday, September 09, 2026
68.0°F

Tilda Swinton backs public appeal to buy Derek Jarman house

Associated Press | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 6 years, 7 months AGO
by Associated Press
| January 23, 2020 12:05 AM

LONDON (AP) — Academy Award-winning actress Tilda Swinton has urged art lovers to chip in and help save the home of the late British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman for the public.

Jarman, whose radical and experimental films included “Caravaggio” and “The Last of England,” lived for eight years in Prospect Cottage, a former fisherman’s hut on a pebble beach at Dungeness in southeast England. He filled the house with art and created a colorful garden that still draws visitors to the stark headland, which is overshadowed by a nuclear power plant.

Jarman died in 1994 of an AIDS-related illness at 52, leaving the house to companion Keith Collins, who died in 2018.

Britain’s Art Fund has until March 31 to raise 3.5 million pounds ($4.6 million) to avoid the house being sold on the open market. That sum will buy the property, pay for its upkeep and allow it to be opened to artists and the public. Half the money has already been raised from public bodies and charities, and the fund launched a crowdfunding appea l Wednesday for the rest.

Leading artists including Jeremy Deller, Tacita Dean, Isaac Julien and Wolfgang Tillmans have given works to reward donors who give to the appeal.

Swinton, who appeared in several Jarman films including “The Garden” and “Edward II,” said the “small, black-painted wooden house with yolk-yellow window frames” would be “inspirational medicine” for future artists.

She said Jarman would be “extremely enthusiastic” about plan to preserve it, even though he once said he wanted his work to “evaporate” after his death.

Swinton said opening the cottage to the public would allow “future artists, thinkers, activists, gardeners to gain from it the practical and spiritual nourishment it lent him.”

The plan also calls for the Tate Britain gallery to receive Jarman’s archive of notebooks, sketches, drawings, letters and photos.

ARTICLES BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

August 18, 2021 12:03 a.m.

Hong Kong police arrest 4 from university student union

HONG KONG (AP) — Four members of a Hong Kong university student union were arrested Wednesday for allegedly advocating terrorism by paying tribute to a person who stabbed a police officer and then killed himself, police said.

July 25, 2021 12:09 a.m.

For South Sudan mothers, COVID-19 shook a fragile foundation

JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Paska Itwari Beda knows hunger all too well. The young mother of five children — all of them under age 10 — sometimes survives on one bowl of porridge a day, and her entire family is lucky to scrape together a single daily meal, even with much of the money Beda makes cleaning offices going toward food. She goes to bed hungry in hopes her children won’t have to work or beg like many others in South Sudan, a country only a decade old and already ripped apart by civil war.

July 24, 2021 12:09 a.m.

For South Sudan mothers, COVID-19 shook a fragile foundation

JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Paska Itwari Beda knows hunger all too well. The young mother of five children — all of them under age 10 — sometimes survives on one bowl of porridge a day, and her entire family is lucky to scrape together a single daily meal, even with much of the money Beda makes cleaning offices going toward food. She goes to bed hungry in hopes her children won’t have to work or beg like many others in South Sudan, a country only a decade old and already ripped apart by civil war.