From Tracey Emin to John Akomfrah: why artists are drawn to the coast

In 1982, the American writer Paul Theroux travelled clockwise from Margate around the coast of Britain for his book The Kingdom by the Sea. By the time he reached rainy Morecambe Bay on the north-west coast, he’d seen enough impoverished guest houses, condemned piers and chilly Brits “lying stiffly on the beach like dead insects” to conclude that he had never felt further from home “than when I was watching people enjoying their sort of seaside vacation”.

About the same time, the photographer Martin Parr was also discovering that there are few better places than the coast for revealing quirks of human behaviour. Returning to the fading seaside resort of New Brighton near Liverpool on summer weekends between 1983 and 1985, he found the perfect place to exercise his wry, anthropological eye.

Yet when his photographs were given the title The Last Resort and exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1986, the chaotic, sweaty, litter-strewn world they portrayed met a decidedly mixed reception. Their candour, colour and wit launched Parr as a singular new talent, but as an outsider, born and raised in suburban Surrey, he also faced criticism for condescension and class voyeurism. At the height of Thatcherism, some could only see a struggling community being exploited for profit by an upwardly mobile southerner.

Parr has always pointed out that before being shown in London, the photographs were exhibited locally without fuss. “No one batted an eyelid because everyone knew what New Brighton was like.” Though undeniably deadpan, The Last Resort is essentially a sequence of pictures of people enjoying themselves.

True, there are glimpses of tatty buildings and defunct entertainment, and yes, there are tidemarks of trash, and too much wince-inducing sunburn and awkward lounging on concrete for most people’s liking. But there are also babies having their toes dipped in the sea for the first time, faces smeared indulgently with ice cream, cuddling couples, gossiping grannies and relish at finally reaching the front of the hot dog queue. Now that the political atmosphere surrounding the series has cooled, it is easier to see how the response was inflamed by personal expectations of what constituted a pleasurable time by the coast.

Those seeking an insider’s perspective on wilting seaside towns did not have too long to wait. Just over a decade later, “Mad Tracey from Margate”, as Tracey Emin used to refer to herself, even having it towed by a plane across the sky for a documentary, would become a household name. Raising far more controversy than Parr ever did, her intimately autobiographical work brought her seaside upbringing to the centre of the contemporary art discourse. In contrast to The Last Resort, Emin’s work showed what it is actually like to live in a resort when it is out of season and, while she was growing up, out of fashion and out of luck.

Until recently, Emin lived away from her hometown for many decades, yet it remains inseparable from her identity and is still a resonant motif in her work. “I realise how lucky I am coming from Margate,” she has said. “It’s a most romantic, sexy, fucking weird place to come from.” She is, at one level, talking about the fun of growing up in a tourists’ playground, with sea and sunsets at the end of every street and a world of illicit adult pleasures and freedoms at her doorstep. But she is also “lucky” in the sense that for an artist whose material is her own life, Margate unspools multiple meanings, lighting up her work with its quintessentially English shabby glory, enriching her creations with colour and depth.

What is it that draws artists to the sea? There are as many answers to this question as there are those who have stood at the shoreline. That is why, although the sight we see from the shore is the same as it has ever been, a place where the boundaries between past and present are slender, creative responses to it are ever-changing. We project ourselves on to the sea and it reflects us back. But images from the past show that this diversity is not only due to differing tastes, personalities and backgrounds. Art of the sea exposes forces lying beyond our individual horizons, tides of social, cultural, environmental and political change, which shape how we look and what we see.

So much so, in fact, that despite Britain being more edge than centre, for much of its history few artists responded to its 11,000 miles of coastline at all. Since Christianity rooted itself on these islands, the shoreline was a place best to be avoided. Dread of divine retribution in the form of a great flood faded over the centuries, but the threat of invasion, pirates, smugglers and wreckers reinforced the sense of the coast as a vulnerable, dangerous zone. Consequently, when the sea first began to appear in art, it was as a backdrop to battleships, shipwrecks, imperial ambition and war.

Coastal resorts started to emerge after enlightenment thinking encouraged curiosity in the natural history of the shoreline, and 18th-century physicians began to become persuaded of the therapeutic benefits of sea-bathing. Yet it was not until the early 19th century — aided by a growing body of Romantic literature and imagery extolling sublime aesthetics — that the sea began appearing more frequently and more variously on artists’ canvases.

By the 20th century, those canvases were revealing not only how the sea reflects shifts and twists in human history, but how it kindles new ways of thinking and seeing too. Shortly before the first world war, a family holiday by a sleepy sandy bay in Dorset inspired Vanessa Bell to make one of the first Post-Impressionist paintings in the country, “Studland Beach”, into which she channelled blossoming Bloomsbury ideas and her obsession with European painting.

Returning from the trenches, the war artist Paul Nash chose the sea at Dymchurch in Kent as a subject again and again as he recovered from his experiences. Over that time his work — particularly “Winter Sea” (1925-1937), which bears an eerie resemblance to no-man’s land — became sharper, tougher and increasingly abstract; ultimately more able to respond to the new world wrought by war. For both painters, the clear space, clean lines and expansive horizons of the coast resonated with the direction of modern art, coaxing their work on to fresher, bolder paths.

In the aftermath of the next world conflict, one of the most remote coastal regions in England started to rival London in incubating avant-garde ideas. Working from studios overlooking the sea at the southernmost extremity of Cornwall, artists including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon, Naum Gabo, Patrick Heron and Terry Frost propelled modernism and established international reputations in the process. Each was drawn to this fiercely beautiful coastline for individual reasons, but there is certainly a subtle sympathy between the landscape and their artistic aims.

In Heron’s words, “Semi-abstract painting had certain underlying rhythmic alliances with this kind of terrain.” Soon, their gaze was being returned to them from across the sea. American artists, gallerists and collectors began visiting St Ives, forging close connections between the tiny fishing town and the new school of Abstract Expressionist painting that was electrifying audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ways of seeing the sea that we have inherited from past generations continue to change. This was brought home to me most powerfully by John Akomfrah’s “Vertigo Sea”, a triptych video piece that debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Here is a wild, restless ocean, a force so uncontainable that it spills across three screens. There are waves breaking, whales breaching, gannets spearing the water, explosions and avalanches and dead bodies washed up on beaches. It shows black-and-white still portraits, and costumed figures standing against dramatic snow-capped peaks. You see belongings washed up around lonely men waiting on the shoreline and a recurring motif of a ticking clock; you hear soaring orchestral music, snippets of poetry, extracts from news bulletins and, ever constant, the hiss and hush of the sea.

Subtitled “Oblique tales on the aquatic sublime”, “Vertigo Sea” is soaked through with Romantic-era iconography of shipwrecks, storms and solitary thinkers. At first, I understood the work as a critique of the sublime, the 18th-century idea of “delightful horror” that saw beauty in harsh, fearsome landscapes. But watching it again recently, I realised that Akomfrah is in fact mobilising this aesthetic to allow us to bear ­witness to difficult truths.

Above all, “Vertigo Sea” is a visceral illustration of the way memories and stories are lost at sea, as well as lives. Interweaving fact and fiction, past and present, species and spaces, it connects imagery of slave ships, sinking migrant boats, harpooned whales, sharks ensnared in nets, polar bears stranded on melting ice caps. Each death haunts the others. “The way of killing men and beasts is the same,” an intertitle reads. The process of forgetting, the work implies, allows acts of violence and dehumanisation to repeat.

As we have learnt more about how integral the sea is to the health of the planet, seeing the long view has become more important. This is why, I suspect, in recent years others have also started to move away from portraying softer, more subjective sides to the sea that were favoured by artists of the past. In 2010, for instance, Yinka Shonibare placed a miniature HMS Victory, fluttering with dozens of colourful batik sails, in a bottle for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square; a comment on British imperialism and trade facilitated by Nelson’s victories.

Five years later, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson installed huge hunks of glacial ice outside the Place du Panthéon in Paris to draw attention to rising sea levels. In 2019, Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall hosted Kara Walker’s “Fons Americanus”, a 13-metre-tall fountain alluding to the suffering of humans transported as cargo across the Atlantic that shaped the modern world.

Once, the sea existed at the edge of our lives. A critical source of livelihood for a small minority of the world’s population; a resource for food, transport, entertainment, reflection and healing for the rest. Now that we are learning how crucial it is to humankind, how it shapes all we do and everything we will be, we are learning to look at it harder and see more.

Lily Le Brun is the author of “Looking to Sea: Britain Through the Eyes of its Artists” (Sceptre), published on November 3 and available to pre-order

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