In this intimate performance, staged in the gallery on 3 September 2025, writer and performer Andra Simons embodied the text in Lubaina Himid‘s Plan B paintings to mark the closing of the third chapter of Stages. Answering the call of Himid’s words, Simons responded to them with writing of his own.

Lubaina Himid’s Plan B series consists of paintings which reflect on time spent as an artist-in-residence at Tate St Ives from 1998 to 1999. Each work is coupled as two canvases, often bisected by a modernist use of colour. One canvas is inscribed with writing and paired with another canvas depicting imaginary communal interior spaces – variously populated by chairs, clocks and ladders as well as isolated windows with views of the sea. The title of the series, Plan B, evokes a sense of event – its secondary nature suggesting that Plan A failed or did not take place. The evocations of the ‘plan’ are multiple: as an itinerary to conjure a set of representations; as cartographic, strategic or schematic; as a draft or spatial projection upon a two-dimensional surface, sketching a speculative, hidden or familiar space.