Will Ballantyne-Reid (UCL) - 2021-22 Students
william.reid.21@ucl.ac.uk

Derek Jarman, Painter: Activism, Archives and Ephemera

The British artist Derek Jarman (1942–1994) is best known as an experimental filmmaker and gay rights activist, and still relatively little remembered as a painter. This project represents a unique opportunity to generate new research on Jarman’s paintings and to situate them in the broader context of the artist’s activist politics, his activities as a collector of objects and ephemera, and creative responses to HIV/AIDS in Britain in the 1980s and early 1990s. In this way, my research aims to engage with the Prospect Cottage archive to shed new light on the history, politics and cultural impact of a modern pandemic in Britain.

Primary supervisor: Prof. Robert Mills, UCL
Secondary supervisor: Prof. Mignon Nixon, UCL