Aaron Lister is Kai Pupuri Matua Senior Curator at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi
City Gallery Wellington staged the largest performance in its history in mid-November. Artist Tobias Allen and their collaborators from Footnote Dance roamed through all the currently vacant spaces of the gallery. These now mute, empty galleries were filled with sound, movement, and bodies. The performers propelled their bodies and those of the audience upstairs and downstairs, inside and outside the gallery.
This was an invocation of other bodies and presences. It specifically honoured UK artist and gay rights activist Derek Jarman and New Zealand dancer and choreographer Douglas Wright. Both have a massive cultural legacy, despite dying way too young. Both lived with HIV. Jarman died from an AIDS-related illness in 1994. Wright succumbed to cancer in 2018. The performance staged in their honour was mournful, angry, and transcendent. Jaws and bodies dropped to the floor.
Jarman’s art was supposed to be on the walls of the gallery but a sudden building closure forced the exhibition to be relocated. This opened a space for this performance which let Jarman enter the gallery in other ways, bound to Allen and Wright.
The exhibition and this performance seek to locate Jarman and his art here in Aotearoa. There is already a connection. His father was born in Christchurch in 1907. Until this exhibition, this was little more than a tantalising footnote in the Jarman story. We were determined to find and make further connections.
This led us to members of Jarman’s extended family, many of whom had never experienced his art. We found a retired Auckland nurse who had treated Jarman in his final days at London’s Saint Mary’s Hospital. There is a man in Nelson who played a Roman centurion in one of Jarman’s feature films and a policeman in another. Then there is the “elder punk” from Palmerston North who befriended Jarman in London. Jarman cast her in a Marc Almond music video.
Broader cultural connections swirl around Jarman’s activism. At one event Fran Wilde linked Jarman’s gay rights campaigning to the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Bill here in 1986. These were parallel campaigns fought against cultures of homophobia and bigotry. Jarman’s public protests against Margaret Thatcher’s repressive conservative government find echoes in the Toitū Te Tiriti hikoi. Jarman’s art as activism speaks to the here and now of contemporary Aotearoa. We get him.
We have also been inundated with photographs and stories from people who have journeyed to Jarman’s famous garden in Dungeness, York. What started as a private place of refuge and retreat has become one of art’s great pilgrimage sites. If you can’t get to Dungeness why not head to “Gloria of Greymouth”? This pink church or “house of queer worship” was established by artist and poet Sam Duckor-Jones in a project that shares the same rich possibilities as Jarman’s garden.
Allen’s performance brought Jarman’s garden into the gallery. Amongst the flowers carried by the performers was a bunch of blue delphiniums. We saw a parallel between the carrying of the delphiniums and our exhibition, which is titled after those very flowers. Unable to stage the exhibition at City Gallery, we have carried and planted the delphiniums in another fertile gallery space. The Dowse Art Museum has partnered with us to ensure this important exhibition could find its audience in Wellington. So you don’t need to go to Kent or even Greymouth to experience Jarman’s art, activism, paintings, films, garden, legacy or influence. He can be found closer to home. This will be the case well after the exhibition closes.
Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days is at the Dowse Art Museum until January 26.
IMAGE Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days, The Dowse Art Museum in partnership with City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, 2024.Hendrix Hennessy-Rophia.
IMAGE Derek Jarman’s Garden at Dungeness in Kent.
IMAGE Gloria, the pink church in Greymouth.