Lubaina Himid

Lubaina Himid
The title for this project was 40 days and 40 nights and I imagined my paintings being part of a huge display of toy Noah's arks borrowed from
collections all over the world in a show which may have included arks owned by tzars, presidents, popes, movie stars and mad academics. I
envisaged a massive painted wooden ark leaning casually against the Bowes Museum which was to have been made by a Newcastle theatre
company's scenery department, designed by me for children to play on, plus as a surprise for the opening evening, there was to be a slide show
of weird and amazing boat buildings projected massively on the front of the museum, a sort of son et lumiere, my favourite kind of outdoor
entertainment. It is clear however that I have reluctantly and yet eventually adapted some wild dreams. That I then decided to turn these ideas for
spectacle into a deeper and longer lasting visual conversation between four artists with far reaching and yet oddly parallel vision has been even
more exciting.
Museums promise much and can deliver in the most eccentric and extraordinary manner. Artists are usually ready for this.

In this particular set of painted juxtapositions of buildings and boats there is a clash between the zones of safety and danger, of stillness and
movement and of the living and the dead, they join together in order to mix memory with strategy.
The paintings and drawings of arks map the mixing and mis-matching which takes place during the process of creative research. This then
enables a display of the maximum number of possiblities, which is often deeply embedded in the debates around how the visual experiencing of
objects can develop and opens out the probability of a vista of yet more visualising. In other words the more you look, the more you see and the
more able you are to see other ways of seeing, other ways of working and other ways of making things to see.

see -makinghistoriesvisible.com/museum_collaborations