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Expansive, palimpsestic, the many sketchbooks crafted and compiled by Derek Jarman throughout his creative life are art objects that continue to complicate normative boundaries of definition and interpretation. Whole worlds hand-bound on reams of luxurious off-white paper, the mature sketchbooks are a distinctive media unto themselves. Set within large, deckle-edged photograph albums bought by Jarman in bulk from a trusted artisan supplier in Florence, he would typically christen them with a rough coat of jet-black paint before ritualistically embellishing the covers with distressed squares of gold; a rough-edged, soft-focus signature. Calligraphy — wisping cursive ink, sometimes sgraffito — marks many of the books as objects of process, sometimes scribbled with multiple working titles for the projects contained within, on others simply his name and the year (Jarman in Farthing and Webb-Ingall, 14-15).
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