Derek Jarman (1942-1994) – the English filmmaker, AIDS activist, and gardener, created his coastal garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, Kent, UK towards the end of his life. Jarman’s embodied explorations of gardening as an essential component of health and well-being, of living in the now while planting for an unknown future, speaks of a quiet resistance, one which characterizes the contents of this issue.
The language of gardening – time and possibility, are present throughout this issue which concerns gardening as a creative act. In every contribution by artists, writers, and poets, there is a distinct permeability and rupture between art as gardening and gardening as art. The physical characteristics of the garden are embedded in the arts, and the artist-gardener is embodied in the lead essay by Gabriel Sacco, who thinks through Jarman’s queer ecological legacies in his own creative gardening and photographic practice. Mehdi Sharafi’s essay on Anselm Kiefer engages with the artist garden as a kind of studio practice, bringing to bear a kind of porosity between art, gardening, and memory – both individual and collective.
The garden as a human endorsement is a central concept in this issue, one which is unpacked as: resistance in contributions by Ash Barbu, Zainab Hussain, and Anna Paluch; immersive process and inter-species dialogue by Carolyn Lambert, Sandra Gregson, Elizabeth L. Pence, and Anna Reckin; and, even ambivalence as in Yu, Kim and Pitre’s white clover maze.
The garden in artistic terms, brings nature to the city, to create community connections and chance encounters as in Mikayla Journée’s essay. Here as in the work of the Collectives, and others, the garden as a site of marginalized memory also proliferates, requiring readers to recognize the colonial contexts of the garden in the wake of Indigenous liberty in which notions of trespass and privilege are ever present. The garden as a creative site of practice, explored through place, material connections and displacement are further explored by Deborah Margo, Desiree Valadares, Zainab Hussain, and Saanya Chopra. Throughout, gardens feature as witnesses to threads of creativity, ancestral knowledge or disruption, queer entanglements, and all threaded through the pressures of climate change and biodiversity loss.
This issue of Drain acts as a kind of assemblage of ideas associated with art as gardening and gardening as a creative act. Can we co-world, and rethink our entangled co-existence to the environment through the garden? This preposition underscores the concept of this issue, wherein the garden figures as a kind of disruption of ‘domestic’ nature, troubling the gap between deep time and present, and requiring of us the need to declassify what we fear – a future without ourselves. Here, we shift the metaphor of the garden as beauty to the garden as an uncanny space and ask: will humans co-make ‘modern nature’ to save it?
This issue was edited by Celina Jeffery
