Queer Remains

Abstract

This article traces the development of Jarman's imagination of medieval reliquary devotion as a practice of queer mourning and memorialization between 1981 and ca. 1993: from draft scripts for the unrealized film Bob-up-a-Down to Blue (1993) and his last hospital journals. In Jarman's works, the reliquary appears not merely as image but also in active use, evidenced in his assemblage paintings and his garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness. Jarman's reliquaries are analyzed in their archival contexts, drawing on medieval and modern repositories. These reliquaries are considered in relation to Jarman's own canonization by both the queer community and the artistic establishment. Before and after his canonization by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in 1991, Jarman was deeply engaged with medieval mystical and medical representations of relics. Working amidst devastating losses and in the knowledge of his own approaching death, Jarman created reliquaries to challenge the denial of public mourning during the AIDS crisis. Jarman's archives emerge as inescapably plural, even within one repository. Like Jarman's imagined reliquary, these archives are made of jewels and ashes, the aesthetic and bodily remains.