British costume designer and three-times Oscar winner Sandy Powell is to donate the cream calico suit she wore to the 2020 Critics’ Circle, Bafta and Oscar ceremonies to raise funds for Art Fund’s £3.5million campaign to save Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage for the nation. 

Throughout the awards season, Sandy asked nominees to sign the suit, gathering more than 100 signatures, including Scarlett Johansson, Brad Pitt, Renée Zellweger, Bong Joon Ho, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Elton John, Joaquin Phoenix, Laura Dern and Saoirse Ronan. Jarman was a close friend and mentor to Powell, who started her career as the costume designer on his 1986 film Caravaggio.

The suit will be auctioned by Phillips to raise funds for Art Fund’s public appeal to save and preserve Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, the home and garden of visionary filmmaker, artist and activist Derek Jarman, for the nation.  The online auction will run from 11am on Wednesday 4 March to 5pm on Wednesday 11 March 2020. During this time the suit will be on display at the front reception at Phillips Berkeley Square.

The campaign received a major boost last week with a commitment from the Luma Foundation to protecting Derek Jarman’s legacy as a pioneering filmmaker. The foundation has restored Jarman’s 92 Super 8 shorts and shares them with audiences worldwide. There is much potential for future collaboration between the artistic programme of residencies planned by the Creative Foundation for Prospect Cottage and the Luma Foundation’s cultural centre in Arles, France, currently under development.

This grant together with support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund, the Linbury Trust and the contributions of over 4,500 people brings the total to £2,640,000 with £860,000 still needing to be raised by 31 March 2020 to purchase Prospect Cottage and to establish a permanently funded programme to conserve and maintain the building, its contents and its garden for the future.

Through an innovative partnership between Art Fund, Creative Folkestone and Tate, the success of this campaign will enable continued free public access to the cottage’s internationally celebrated garden, the launch of artist residencies, and guided public visits within the cottage itself. Creative Folkestone will become custodians of Prospect Cottage, oversee its long-term care and run these programmes. Jarman’s important archive from the cottage, including his sketchbooks and plans for the garden, will be entrusted to Tate and made available for public access at Tate Britain. Without Art Fund’s appeal, Prospect Cottage is at risk of being sold privately, its contents dispersed, and artistic legacy lost.

After Jarman purchased the cottage in 1986, it quickly became a source of inspiration and a creative hub where his parallel artistic practices and collaborators came together. Today it represents the most complete distillation of his pioneering creativity across film, art, writing and gardening: from his 1990 film The Garden starring Tilda Swinton, to his journal, Modern Nature, to poetry etched in the glass, to driftwood sculptures and the remarkable garden he created on the shingle beach.

More than 25 years after his death, Prospect Cottage continues to be a site of pilgrimage for people from all over the world who come to be inspired by its stark beauty and by Jarman’s legacy. The cottage and its contents are now being sold following the death in 2018 of Keith Collins, Jarman’s close companion in his final years, to whom he bequeathed the cottage.

Art Fund is calling on the public to donate to the campaign via its crowdfunding platform Art Happens: 

Pictured: Brad Pitt signs Sandy Powell's suit.