The World As Yet Unseen - Women Artists in Conversation with Partou Zia

ISBN 978-0-9572097-9-4 First published 2019:

Falmouth Art Gallery, Municipal Buildings, The Moor, Falmouth TR11 2RT

Curators:

Dr. Penny Florence, Clare Cooper

Text:

Dr. Penny Florence, Clare Cooper and Henrietta Boex

Photography:

Steve Tanner

Catalogue design:

Steve Collinson, xgraphica

Our warmest thanks to co-curators Dr Penny Florence and Clare Cooper, to all the artists and lenders whose willingness has made this exhibition possible; also to Richard Cook and the staff and volunteers of Falmouth Gallery. www.pennyflorence.com/ www.artfirst.co.uk

Front cover: Partou Zia Green Breath, 2006, oil on canvas, 152 x 183 cm Back Cover: Partou Zia Small Bird, oil on card, 24 x 27 cm

The World As Yet Unseen Women Artists in Conversation with Partou Zia

6 April – 15 June 2019

Municipal Buildings The Moor Falmouth Cornwall TR11 2RT

Introduction Henrietta Boex I’m delighted to host The World As Yet Unseen: Women Artists in Conversation with Partou Zia at Falmouth Art Gallery and to welcome you to this catalogue.

I never met Partou, although I begin to feel I know her, both through these brilliant paintings and those all the distinguished contributiors.

A few words about the genesis of this new exhibition will be of interest, especially to those who recall the Women Artists in Cornwall 1880-1940 that was staged at Falmouth Art Gallery in 1996 by the then Curator, Catharine Wallace. Our original idea was to make a sequel to that show, with the intention of picking up the baton to feature women artists in Cornwall post 1940.

At about the same time as we began our planning we were approached by Dr. Penny Florence who offered us a large oil painting on long-term loan for the Art Gallery Collection. This was a Self Portrait (1992) bequeathed to her by Partou, and featured in the current show.

The idea for an exhibition to launch this new loan and feature Partou’s work was mooted by Dr Florence and enthusiastically welcomed by Partou’s husband Richard Cook and her gallerist Clare Cooper, of Art First. We soon aligned our thinking when the idea took root of ‘conversations’ and a main focus on the extraodinarily rich culture here in Cornwall of contemporary art by women.

We are hugely grateful to all the participants, to our generous artists and lenders and to everyone who has worked so hard. Finally, a special thank-you is due to our guest curators, Penny and Clare.

Facing Page Top: Rose Hilton Into the night, 1995, oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm Below: Gillian Ayres Cinnabar, 1998, oil on canvas, 244 x 213 cm

Rose Hilton 15 August 1931 – 19 March 2019 When I went to Rose’s house in Botallack to choose her drawings for this exhibition she was looking forward to the opening, and to the film presentation, and, as we discussed how strange it was to grow old, she sat up straighter and said, with a laugh, “but enjoyable!”. Everyone loved to spend time with Rose. She died a few days later, 11 years to the day after Partou. Farewell also to Gillian Ayres, who died on 11 April only last year.

Penny Florence

Poetic Alchemy; Poetic Reality Penny Florence Prof. Emerita, The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL

What better way to write this catalogue than through the words of its principal: the artist and writer Partou Zia?

Like a poem, a painting is a festival, a holiday; A

painting is a pause that celebrates or makes a place for Remembrance.

Memory in itself cannot be transforming or transfiguring. The act

poetic alchemy changes one thing - the real experience - into another thing, a new or unknown thing. It is the imagination that acts as the director of this of

Ceremony of Remembrance: painting.

Taking memory and playfully, intimately pushing it and

entering the world of things as yet unseen; the word as yet kneading it into a new becoming. Therefore

un-enunciated; the emotion still barely perceived.

Partou was very clear about “what art is”. It is a joyous act of the imagination that garners all experience and time into a vibrant present. It affords a glimpse of the world as you’ve never seen it before; a glimpse that changes that world. This alchemy is the first thought behind this exhibition.

Partou Zia Not Narcissus, oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm

There is another, and it was equally dear to Partou, as everyone who knew her is aware. It is the world, and art, as seen by women, not as individuals, but collectively. You might call the show feminist; but the art is not feminist or anything else-ist. It is art. It is art by women who have a genuine relation to Partou - and to Cornwall.

This last is very far from subsidiary. Cornwall is essential, as I’ll try to explain.

Among all the advances there have been since the emergence of modern feminism, there is (at least!) one that remains elusive. It is how the vision of women can be regarded, sometimes as specifically female, yes, but at the same time, as relevant to everyone in showing them who they are; as universal. We have lived with this paradox as regards the brilliance of men’s traditions for a very long time.

We have studied men’s art as a whole, in movements and in artists’ conversations with each other. But, a little like the Bechdel test in films (where a film has to have at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man), we need to see what a conversation about art in general might sound/look like.

To move towards allowing this conversation to come into view is the second of our aims for the exhibition. Of course, no single exhibition can do this on its own; and of course, we do not claim that this is the only, or even the best, way of bringing it about. Yet among the definitions of great art, highly contested though they are, is this: art that speaks across time and place. Here we do have an advantage.

Partou Zia Self Portrait, 2005, oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm

Cornwall holds a special position in modern and contemporary art in Britain, and Partou’s dual heritage as Iranian-British is an essential part of how we seek to understand place in the 21st Century. It is arguably only now that diaspora as an experience is beginning to be seen and understood.

Cornwall, of course, has its own diaspora, in the form of the engineering, mining and scientific expertise it has accumulated and continues to export.

On the other hand, its geographic qualities, above all, its extraordinary light, have attracted artists not only for the last century, but also beyond.

This heritage has enabled us to assemble an outstanding collection of works by women artists, all of whom have time and place in common. The list exemplifies the strength of British modern and contemporary art, with an extraordinary variety of styles and approaches. Their ages span the decades of this century and the last, going right back to Barbara Hepworth (born1903), and most of them are active now. Because Cornwall has impacted on them all, we are at least able to begin to ask some new questions.

We have included (in this catalogue) only one artist who does not know Cornwall, and we have a very particular reason for this. She is the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, now living in exile in the USA. Born 154 km away from Partou in 1957, she is virtually Partou’s exact contemporary (born 1958). We are convinced that if Partou were still with us, she and Shirin would have become friends. It’s a fascinating and wonderful thoughtexperiment to imagine what might have transpired. They both draw from a place deep within self and tradition where word and image are on the cusp of becoming each other, as in the dream. You can see this in Shirin Neshat’s great The Book of Kings (2012) series of photographic portraits, which includes Nida (Patriots), shown here, and perhaps even more in her extraordinary moving image work. Nida is from the Patriots series, courtesy of Gladstone Galley, New York and Brussels.

Facing page Top: Partou Zia Newlyn Lovers, 2005, oil on canvas, 49 x 60 cm Below: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Ultramarine II, 2000, acrylic on canvas, 91.4 x 121.7 cm

“Like a

poem, a painting” [...]

The pairing of poetry and painting is more that just comparing words with images.

Poems are magical words; paintings are magical images; the two inseparable, yet distinct, like the figures in her paintings, like the Lover with the Beloved.

These two terms, the Lover and the Beloved, especially the latter, are more again than we might casually assume. They derive from the Persian poetry and art of Partou’s ancestry. She always described her origins as Persian, not as Iranian. This is accurate as well as carrying a deep personal charge: her father was a prominent dissident; and it was the Iranian revolution of 1978-9 that drove the whole family out of their home. Since her first language was Farsi, having to speak English was another kind of exile for the young artist. She eventually embraced it, as she did Cornwall. But it was not without a struggle, and not without permanent mark.

The act of poetic alchemy changes one thing the real experience - into another thing, a new or

unknown thing That new understanding grows through three inseparable gifts of Persian literature and painting. To the first two, the Lover and the Beloved, we must add Love itself. It is impossible to disentangle them.1 I to thou to thee are all interrelated; observation is not a solo activity.

At any one moment, there are eyes upon eyes, some aware of the other, while others not even recognising the multi-dimensional

blinking performed around them.

Here we get closer to why Partou’s writing and painting are so interlinked - and we begin to see how the visionary in her work is not some distant realm, separate from the here and now. In fact it IS the here and now, if we have the single- pointed

Partou Zia Shadow Writing, 2005, oil on canvas, 51 x 76 cm

concentration to glimpse it, to become aware of the pause between breathing in and breathing out. As Partou takes a ‘step out of the sayable” and towards the “not yet known”, she comes to inhabit the poetic, the zone where words become visual.

For what kind of poem cannot conjure an image, while at the same time being of the body? With great insight, Partou sees that an apparent dislocation is where the hidden structure lies, expressing it as the dance of the real and the imagined; with great subtlety, she sustains this thought into the notion of a step, holding the metaphor of the dance right there where the unknown suffuses the known.2

The apparent dislocation of the end image is the locus of that hidden pattern. A disguise for the dance of the real and the imagined, gathered together to step

out of the sayable into the unsayable zone of experience; transfiguring expectation of place and people. For me that is how painting proceeds: slow, doubtful, strange to the mind’s eye, and ever dictatorial in its demands that I remain alert to the

sudden, and the not yet known.[...]

To recall a single phrase from a poem requires no concept, not even the antiquated principles of learning by rote. It is the repetition and the journey of word-to-image- to-emotion that allows for the poetic phrase to be imbedded on one’s tongue; the poetic reality of those few words then take command as axis of comparison or standardization, that is set against everything experienced as “the real”.

This is a complex passage, with many wonderful ideas concerning how both words and images, if they are to reach poetic truth, come from the

Partou Zia On the Dunes, 2005, oil on card, 24 x 25 cm

body, and are understood through the senses and intelligence combined.

This is a clue towards understanding how she embodies new stories in her work, embedding them in myths that she develops for our times. For if you read between the lines of almost all myths, there were variants, different versions and outcomes. This isn’t surprising, as they originated in oral traditions. What has come down to us is masked by centuries of history recorded largely by men. This wasn’t always deliberate; it was the world as they saw it. For Partou, explicit reference to Classical mythology blends seamlessly with the Beloved of Persian traditions, with Eurydice, wife of Orpheus, the poet as especially significant. 3

1 BELOVED (ma’šūq in Arabic and Persian) belongs, together with Lover (ʿāšeq) and Love (ʿešq), to the three concepts that dominate the semantic field of eroticism in Persian literature and mysticism. The interrelation among these concepts makes it almost impossible to treat any one of the concepts separately. (Encyclopaedia Iranica, accessed 6.3.19).

2 Partou read constantly, and her studio was full of books. Among the many poets she admired,

the Irish held a special place, including Seamus Heaney and W.B. Yeats. Partou’s thought in this passage brings to mind for many of us the latter’s 1928 poem Among Schoolchildren and its much-quoted “How can we know the dancer from the dance”.

3 In a fascinating study, Iranian scholar Massih Zekavat connects mythological traditions

to suggest that unpicking the binary thinking of Persian and classical myth would further understanding of ecology. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/iss4/10/, accessed 7.3.19.

Above: Partou Zia Ember of Eyes, 2004, oil on canvas, 46 x 61 cm Facing: Partou Zia Reader, 2003, oil on board, 15 x 18.5 cm

Who is this wild-haired woman striding forth in the dark At the heart of Partou’s oeuvre is the self-portrait. If we are to understand what she brings to this time-honoured genre, we need to bear in mind the two thoughts that underlie what you have just read above: entering a new world; and experiencing simultaneously both its difference and its relation to the the everyday. This clearly means being open to the possibility that what is apparently distinct actually overlaps; Love, the Lover, the Beloved are inseparable; dislocation is the hidden pattern; they are all the dance.

Last night I felt my shadow had changed; as I turned to go indoors my shadow surprised me, blotted in synchronistic motion alongside my steps an alien being I could not recognise. Who is this wild-haired woman striding forth in the dark?

I find in these brilliant words the thrill of the minor note that predominates in many non-Western musical traditions4, the one that sends a shiver down the spine. It is the shiver of the uncanny ,the familiar made strange. This experience is only about the artist herself insofar as she matters to her art. What I mean is that Partou’s self-portraits are only about herself up to a certain point. The same is possibly true of most, if not all, great self-portraiture, but I think that with Partou, the thought deserves particular attention.

To begin with, Partou uses herself in many works that are not actually self-portraits.

In some of these, her likeness appears twice, as a double; by now, I daresay we will all recognise the Beloved. But there is also the double as understood by Freud, most particularly in his essay on The Uncanny, with which Partou was thoroughly acquainted, alongside feminist critiques of this essay and of Freud in particular.5

Facing: Partou Zia In Accord II, 2007, oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

It is important to remember this, because otherwise we might lose sight of her vital connection with the present by foregrounding the mystical. But she was fully rounded and courageous; no nostalgia for any idealised past, such as the Pre-Raphelites had. The overall importance of myth and stories to her work is not about nostalgia or escape to an idealised place or time. It’s more about the accumulated wisdom of humanity over all time, which, with characteristic breadth as well as depth, Partou knows belongs to the world, not to any given culture. The difficulty of self-realisation is a huge life-lesson for everyone; for a woman of dual heritage it is defining.

[Others] would as happily tear us limb to limb, than let us Be ourselves: as an unknown, dangerously ambiguous and uncommitted Self.

Again, what a powerful phrase, “an unknown, dangerously uncommitted Self”!

Partou was not one to be crossed. Yet with this fierceness came a kindness, consideration and quirky humour that delighted all who knew her. It would be to diminish the work to fail to see this in it. The same goes, however, for her pain.

The stark reality is that I am neither of the here nor of the place I journeyed from in childhood; it has come about so that now I belong to no people or place.

And in Between THE unSpoken and THE unSpeakable Rest the Untouched Moments of Unknown Thoughts6

Facing: Partou Zia In Accord I, 2007, oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

The works created towards the end of her life show clearly Partou’s unflinching knowledge that it would be soon. But I leave you with the living eye of a painter who knew how to love and to embrace whatever she was given.

I lounge sleepily against the rocks on the curl of Gwenver’s headland perched overlooking White Sands Bay. [...] At a distance almost reachable with one eye shut sits the Wolf lighthouse, and a hazy silhouette of intrigue on the very nib of this grey horizon salutes the outer plots of the Scillies.

How I love the wilderness of Cornwall, the untouched quality of these lanes, may it be so always.

4 The musician and musicologist, Dr Sarha Moore, has discussed “the other leading note” (the

Phrygian 2nd, deriving from ancient Greece) in World Music and through it, the binaries that that Partou also interrogates. http://tagg.org/xtrnlinx.html 5 Partou’s PhD submission was unconventional even by the enlightened standards of practice based doctorates, as I know well, since it was my privilege to supervise her studies.

6 This quotation is presented as Partou presented it. All the other quotations were originally written as straightforward prose.

Facing: Partou Zia Chapel Cove, 1992, oil on canvas, 102 x 122 cm

In Dialogue Clare Cooper During her five sparkling years of exhibiting in London with Art First, Partou’s paintings addressed metaphysical issues with increasing intensity.

Every inch of space on her canvas became more alive with the energy of presence – the luminous pigment, the searching gestural marks, examined the artist’s vibrant ‘epiphanic moments of perception’. Thought Paintings was Partou’s introductory exhibition at the gallery in September 2004. Her novel method of story-telling had an immediate impact on new collectors as much as on a new group of fellow artists. Very few had seen her groundbreaking 2003 exhibition at Tate St Ives following her Residency in the Porthmeor Studio, where by happy co-incidence she had been a neighbour of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s.

Entering the Visionary Zone was a title which succinctly described that unforgettable encounter with Partou’s new body of work. From the large eventful, mysterious canvases on the Tate’s walls to the tiny paintings on wooden panel clustered within glass cabinets, she brought us into a new world we had not seen before. It was difficult, it was complex to read, but it was compelling and magical. It was the moment I met her for the first time, and knew immediately that something was going to happen. From a tingle in my spine to a firm agreement, I was privileged to become her gallerist and her friend.

Then, out of the blue, over Easter in 2005, Partou was cruelly diagnosed with a life threatening cancer and given only nine months to live. She chose to defy this sentence with every aspect of her being. Almost at once, she threw herself into working on an ambitious solo show later that

Top: Partou Zia His Offering, 2004, oil on canvas, 45 x 60 cm Above: Partou Zia Bird on a Plinth, 2003, oil on board, 45 x 16 cm

year, presciently titled The Grey Syllable, and she maintained that focused momentum until the very end in 2008.

Partou’s pursuit of the self portrait as a self-denuding of the ‘I’, in both the pictorial and the poetic sense, now moved inexorably towards a portrait of absence, or as she phrased it, ‘the one-that-is-not-I’. The figure as a shimmering persona began to fuse more and more with the experience of being IN the landscape or the room, while remaining separate in thought.

Green Breath for example, is one of the large, majestic canvases which announce the arrival of the grey figure; that simultaneous presence and absence which infused the later works and also brought revelatory passages into her writing. (1).

The Notebooks of Euridice Is an astonishing compilation which Partou edited and worked on continuously, and which has now been published in Alchemy (2), an exquisite small cloth bound book of essays by Writers on Truth, Lies and Fiction ; Vision is out there and we will walk, hobble, swim or crawl to find it’ the cover tells us.

Here is the final passage from that essay: TRUST, TRUST, TRUST. The cool brisk totality of all that lives around my presence begins to pervade every cell, calling for compassion. I yield and in an instant, as in a vision, I sense the absolute union of self to other. In a sudden realization I decide, I become, I am completely opened out to the purity of body, spirit and hence the love of That which is also This. I no longer need my mannerisms or attitudes, and as a garment long grown too tight for my spirit I strip down to myself. Tonight I pack my soul’s bag and depart to another place and a different element altogether, no longer belonging to what I was. Instead, Purity, Presence and Poetry – is where I am bound.

Partou Zia Green Breath, 2006, oil on canvas, 152 x 183 cm

Partou knew many of the artists participating in this Falmouth exhibition.

However, there are a few whom she never met, Barbara Hepworth being one of them, as her dates indicate; equally, Aimée Parrot and Devlin Shea, whose early careers did not bring them into direct contact. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham on the other hand, was familiar both because of her long tenure as a senior modernist painter based in St Ives since 1940, and because she and Partou were represented by Art First for a brief overlapping period, making it possible for them to see and to learn about each other’s exhibitions at close quarters. Penny, Partou and I attended Barns-Graham’s deeply touching memorial service in St Ives in 2004, and then in a lighter mood we enjoyed Tate St Ives’s 2005 memorial exhibition: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Movement and Light Imag(in)ing Time. None of us could have imagined that three years later, Penny and I would be steeling ourselves to get through the shocking reality of Partou’s own funeral in 2008 following her brave, inspired, creative battle against cancer.

The principal artist Partou wanted to meet at Art First was Eileen Coooper, because their figurative, expressive work shared a pre-occupation with the self-portrait as universal, or as archetype. The prevailing themes of lover and dreamer or of the alert, playful, creative central participant characterise their art, and their narrative styles which defy traditional perspective, both acknowledge Chagall and also a range of liberating non-European models.

Partou’s formidable intelligence and her commitment made for instant connections with the artists who met her. Her trips to London for gallery visits or to attend Tate openings were also a visual delight, for she came dressed in charming vintage clothes, often wearing white lace gloves and a pink beret. Her beauty and radiance are the first thing that still comes to mind; she sparkled, but she was challenging too, with a growing sense of urgency in how she spent her time. On the final studio visit in Cornwall she was at home, surrounded by the selection of paintings she wanted me to see. After our light healthy ceremonial lunch, she reclined on her sofa,

Eileen Cooper Ritual, 1994 – 1998, oil on canvas, 91.4 x 121.9 cm

exhausted, her slippered feet resting on piled Persian rugs, and she looked out to sea. “Nowadays I like to sit here and simply watch the changing light ” she told me. It is something I treat as a mantra now – a lesson from Partou to stop, to try and be still for long enough to observe the light, to ‘pay attention’.

(1): In her essay Penny Florence has selected illuminating extracts, many of them unpublished, from Partou’s writing. Since Ginny Button’s essay in the 2003 Tate St Ives catalogue accompanying Entering the Visionary Zone, Penny Florence has been the leading voice for Partou’s work. She supervised Partou’s PhD, awarded by Plymouth University in 2001, entitled The Poetic Anatomy of the Numinous: a Visual and Theoretical Search for the Other. For Art First she wrote,‘Paint me an Angel’ in the exhibition catalogue for The Grey Syllable in 2005. On 4 April 2004 she wrote Partou Zia’s Obituary for the Guardian and then contributed to Partou Zia, The Memorial Exhibition publication at the Exchange, Penzance in 2008. For Art First’s online catalogue Portraits Beyond Self, 2013 she once more contributed a penetrating essay.

Penny continues to work on Partou’s writing – the plays, journals and poetry – in preparation for future publication, and has taken the lead role in writing the current publication.

(2) Alchemy was published by Notting Hill Editions in 2016 with an introduction by Iain Sinclair and includes essays by Joanna Kavenna, Gabriel Josipovici, Benjamin Markovits, Partou Zia and Anakana Schofield. Joanna Kavenna will be participating in one of the special workshops held during the exhibition

Partou Zia High Altar, 2005, oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm

Ten years on, Falmouth Art Gallery offered us the opportunity to open wide the doors, to pick up once again on a lively dialogue between Partou and a wide ranging group of influential women artists with links to Cornwall. We have included as many, but certainly not all, those wishing to be a part of this dialogue, and it is our wish that this is a beginning of something which may continue far beyond the time and place of the exhibition itself.

In the open spirit which characterises this exhibition, we have curated it to allow the visual, poetic and emotional dialogues between Partou and each participant to speak for themselves. There are endless possible configurations for the hang, as indeed there are for positioning images within this catalogue. We invite engagement and discussion throughout the exhibition and its related events and workshops, but to begin the process, to hint just a little at the thinking behind our selection, here are a few visual ‘pairings’ to give you a sense of the conversation.

Partou Zia Interior with Geranium, 2001, oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm

Top: Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) ‘Autumn Window’, c.1970, oil on canvas, 60 x 73.6 cm Above: Aimée Parrott ‘Furrow’ 2019, wool, wax, fabric dye on calico, 41.5cm x 31.5 cm

Top: Partou Zia Typewriter, 1998, oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm Above: Bridget Riley Woman at Tea Table, coloured crayons, pastel, 48.2 x 73.7 (Ingram Collection)

Top: Sandra Blow Interaction, 1998, collage on canvas, 122 x 122 cm Above: Kate Walters When Eye Becomes Bird 5, 2019, watercolour on paper, 28 x 38 cm

Top: Tacita Dean A Sequence of Stones – Hunengrab II (floating), 2009, blackboard paint on fibreglass print, 21.5 x 44.3 cm x 3 from Falmouth Art Gallery collection Above: Partou Zia Landscape Portrait, Wales, 2007, oil on canvas 76 x 102 cm

Above Left: Partou Zia Skein With Hands, 2003/4, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm Above Right: Devlin Shea Canvas - Option Anxiety, 2018, oil on Linen, 55 x 65 cm

Top Left: Partou Zia Portrait with a Horse, 2017, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm Top Right: Lucy Stein I dreamt of falling leaves in a wild storm, 2015/19,

oil, resin, feather, collage on canvas, 50 x 50 cm Above: Nina Royle Head with Cows, 2019, ink on paper, 21 x 29 cm Bottom Right: Lubaina Himid We Made these Rope Ladders for the Boat 2001,

acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm

Above: Naomi Frears Ready Now, 2019, oil on canvas, 61 x 61 cm Top Right: Barbara Hepworth Magic Stone, 1972, white marble, 65 x 75 x 40 cm Lower Right: Veronica Ryan Trenoweth Fragments, 2018, Stone and wool, 6 x 8 x 9 cm

Partou Zia 1958 – 2008 Partou Zia was born in Tehran, Persia in 1958 and emigrated to England in 1970. She studied Art History at the University of Warwick (1977-80) and Fine Art at the Slade (1986-91), completing a PhD at Falmouth College of Arts and the University of Plymouth in 2001. She moved to Cornwall in 1993 where she lived and worked with her husband, the painter Richard Cook, until her death from cancer, in March 2008. Tate St Ives honoured her passing by hanging one of her last completed canvases, Forty Nights and Forty Days as a memorial for a month on the gallery‘s entrance lobby wall.

In 2003 Tate St Ives initiated a pioneering residency programme at the historic Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, previously occupied by Borlase Smart, Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron. Partou Zia was the first recipient of this award and her subsequent exhibition at Tate St Ives was accompanied by a catalogue, Entering the Visionary Zone, with an essay by Dr Virginia Button.

Shortly after this she joined Art First in London where she exhibited until 2008 and thereafter, posthumously. Her work is held in the collection of the British Museum, London and in the New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.

Facing Page Top Left: Penny Florence It Begins, 2015, monoprint, 40 x 30 cm Bottom Left: Penny Florence Shadowed (A Dialogue with Partou), 2019, 29 x 25.5 cm (detail) screen print of digital poem composed out of Partou’s writings.

Top Right: Shirin Neshat Nida (Patriots), from the Book of Kings series Bottom Right: Partou Zia Untitled, 2003, oil on canvas , 24 x 27 cm

Gillian Ayres (1930 – 2018) Cinnabar, 244 x 213 cm https://www.alancristea.com/artists/41-gillian-ayres/ Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912 – 2004) Ocean, 2000, acrylic on paper, 56 x 76 cm http://barns-grahamtrust.org.uk/ Sandra Blow (1925 – 2006) Cambridge, paper collage, 50 x 70 cm https://sandrablow.com/About Eileen Cooper Collage, 2016, 30 x 40 cm http://www.eileencooper.co.uk/ Tacita Dean A Sequence of Stones – Hunengrab II (floating), 2009, blackboard paint on fibreglass print, 21.5 x 44 cm http://www.tacitadean.net/ Naomi Frears Creek, oil on canvas, 61 x122 cm http://www.naomifrears.com/ Barbara Hepworth (1905 – 1973) Magic Stone, white marble, 1972, 65 x 75 x 40 cm http://barbarahepworth.org.uk/ Rose Hilton (1932 – 2019) Standing Nude (Kirsten), 2019, charcoal on paper, 20.5 x 29.5 cm https://www.messums.com/artists/view/32/Rose_Hilton Lubaina Himid We made these rope ladders for the boat, 2001, Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm https://lubainahimid.uk/

Shirin Neshat Nida (Patriots), from the Book of Kings series, 2012, ink on LE silver Gallatin print, 152.4 x 114.3cm https://gladstonegallery.com/artist/shirin-neshat/#&panel1-1 Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) Autumn Window, c.1970, oil on canvas, 60 x 73.6 cm, signed verso, ©The Estate of the Artist. http://www.winifrednicholson.com/ Aimée Parrott ’Furrow’, 2019, wool, wax, fabric dye on calico 41.5 x 31.5 cm https://www.aimeeparrott.com/ Bridget Riley Brouillard, 1981/2003, screen print, 78.6 x 71.9 cm.

Courtesy of Karsten Schubert http://bridgetrileyservices.co.uk/ Nina Royle Head with Cows, 2019, ink on paper, 21 x 29 cm https://ninaroyle.co.uk/ Veronica Ryan The Place I Am In, 2018, drawing https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/veronica-ryan-2293 Devlin Shea Option Anxiety, 2018, oil on Linen, 55 x 65 cm https://www.devlinshea.com/ Lucy Stein I dreamt of falling leaves in a wild storm, 2015-2019, oil, resin, feather, collage on canvas, 50 x 50 cm http://galerie.gregorstaiger.com/Lucy-Stein-Biography Kate Walters When Eye becomes Bird 2, 2019 https://www.katewalters.co.uk/