Gathering together newly commissioned essays by international art critics and scholars devoted to specific—and sometimes lesser-known—aspects of the artist's life and work and extensive portfolios spanning his successive bodies of works, this monograph offers an accessible overview of Derek Jarman, one of the legendary cultural figures of the second half of the 20th century. 
Conceived as a reader, this volume includes essays by cultural critic Elisabeth Lebovici, Le Crédac Director and Curator Claire Le Restif, Manchester Art Gallery Curator Fiona Corridan, garden historian Marco Martella, and journalist and activist Cy Lecerf Maulpoix, a comprehensive interview with Jarman's collaborator James Mackay, as well as testimonies—among other Jarman's friends—by actress Tilda Swinton and musician Simon Fisher Turner, and an illustrated chronology. 
Jarman's militant "Queer Paintings" series (1992), his tender Super8 films from the mid-1970s, his emotional assemblages made at Prospect Cottage (Dungeness, Kent) whose cultivation was both a form of therapy and a metaphor for his own survival after he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, are considered together to focus on Jarman as a visual artist—a painter and an assemblagist—and how his artistic practice can be understood as a catalyst for his manifold activities and visions.