A Sense of Place: Lubaina Himid and the Sea

A&A Lecture Series:

For four weeks in November 1998 and three weeks in March 1999 Lubaina Himid CBE RA held an artist’s residency in Porthmeor, an area of St Ives in Cornwall, England where she painted her complex and haunting series of works, Plan B. The invitation for the residency had come from a Tate St Ives curator who had read what he described as ‘the quasi-autobiographical diary’ in the catalogue for a 1995 show of Himid’s work called Beach House. Himid’s essay for the Beach House catalogue foregrounded an autoethnographic impulse in her writing, an impulse that added flesh to the bones of the beautiful and vibrant Beach House works in which the paintings became ciphers for a whole wealth of experiences that she conjured and remembered: experiences of sands, seas and shores from across the globe, from Beit El Ras in Zanzibar to Havana and Matanzas in Cuba, to Malibu, Santa Monica, Aldeburgh, Blackpool, Dungeness, Wells-next-to-Sea, St Ives and many, many more in between. The text weaves in and out of pleasure and horror, ease and tension, strangeness and familiarity, fire and water, and is reflected in part in the shifting architectural forms of the structures that shape the series of paintings and their wildly variable and utterly seductive colour palettes. Using Beach House as its jetty, this lecture will explore the complex, multivalent possibilities evoked by the sea in the visual art of Lubaina Himid.