Lubaina Himid’s Zanzibar series is built around several journeys, some physical and some remembered. Himid was born in Zanzibar in 1954 and travelled to England with her mother when she was only four months old after her father died. Decades later she returned to Zanzibar in 1997 and realised that she had already been painting aspects of the island without consciously knowing it.
That idea stays with me.
We often think observation comes first and artwork second. You see a place, then represent it.
Memory can reverse the order.
Colour, sea, rain, shutters or fragments of architecture may appear in paintings before the artist fully understands what they belong to.
Himid describes the series as containing cloves, fishing nets, the sea, malaria and women’s tears. She also listened to a great deal of music while making it.
The paintings therefore do not behave like geographical documents.
They are closer to maps drawn after forgetting most of the roads.
Sometimes the inaccuracies of memory may tell us more about a place than accurate coordinates ever could.
