ABOVE/BELOW
Homage à Derek Jarman
A weaving, by Maria Damon, 2024
… awakening to combinations and relations… Juxtaposition, a term of combination and relation that takes estrangement into account, becomes a fundamental visionary technique in modernism and beyond. (Robinson, 9-11)
Who better epitomizes modern Romanticism in all its contradictory, contestatory impulses than filmmaker, artist, nature writer, and activist Derek Jarman? Of the nocturnal cruising episodes on Hampstead Heath that may have been responsible for his contraction of HIV/AIDS, and his unwillingness to forego these erotic encounters even after diagnosis, he writes, addressing himself, “You shouldn’t be standing here under these cold stars. You don’t have the stamina to do this … But… throwing my arms around a stranger is an act of defiance that keeps me alive.” When diagnosed, his response was to build a garden on the coast in Dungeness, on the southeast tip of England, an arid, windswept, and generally inhospitable expanse of shingle in the shadow of a then-working nuclear power plant. That garden became his heaven in Hell’s despite, his queer Eden.
My “data visualization” weaving project casts a warp (longitude) with the colors of the garden, bordered by the black and yellow of Prospect Cottage, the site of the garden. For the weft/woof, I cast four colors to correspond to the four nucleotides that comprise all DNA sequences, and wove the genomic sequence of an HIV/AIDS virus from the UK in 1986, the place and year in which Jarman received his diagnosis. The weft colors I chose were blue (for the ocean, which can be seen from the front of the house), black (for grief of death), metallic gold and/or silver (for the audacity of Jarman’s flamboyantly queer artistry), and brown (for the reassuring stability of the earth which he worked while creating the garden and to which he would return). Combination and relation across all grids of time and space, color and form, pattern and chaos, heaven and earth, cold stars and hot encounters. Weaving yokes the horrors of HIV/AIDS to the sublimity of Jarman’s achievement –though not without friction, without struggle. For every combination is a contestation, as the snippet of Ernest Jones’s “The Song of the Low” cited in Jeffrey Robinson’s provocation makes evident: weaving casts high and low in sharp class struggle: the poem observes that those who weave cannot afford to wear what they weave. In response, I wear what I have woven for Jarman, bringing my artisanship and his glorious artistry into conversation.
A response by Maria Damon to Jeffrey Robinson's Romantic Manifestos Manifest (2024)
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