The Legend of St Ives

The imagery for this project began with a photograph of Barbara Hepworth, who worked in St Ives for many years. Through a gradual process of distortion and transformation, the figure evolved into the wave and island, then ultimately into the Red St Ia painting.

The Cornish town of St Ives acquired its name from St Ia, the myth of a virgin Irish Princess‑cum‑Saint, who supposedly arrived in the bay on a leaf in the fifth century AD.

A group of Celtic saints gathered on the beach on Ireland's southern coast, waiting for the right tide and good weather to cross the short stretch of the Atlantic to Cornwall. When they decided it was safe to venture out, the Elders agreed it was too great a risk to take Princess Ia, or Hya as she was known to some. She was too young, and it was doubtful she was strong enough to make the journey.

Abandoned on the beach by those who should have been her protectors, Ia stood and watched despondently as their boat disappeared over the distant horizon. She knelt and prayed for her friends' safe arrival in their new home. Resigning herself to the fact that she wouldn’t be going on this great adventure, the girl decided to remove herself from the blustery foreshore and seek shelter for the night before starting the journey back home to the village where she had been raised in a Celtic Christian community.

As her gaze dropped from the distant skyline to the waves lapping around her feet, Ia’s eye caught sight of something floating on the water nearby. Her curiosity was strong, and she had to investigate the article. On closer inspection, the item of interest proved to be nothing more than a leaf, blown from a nearby tree, no doubt. Absentmindedly, the youngster prodded the leaf with the staff she was carrying to see if it would sink. The contrary was true: when the stick touched the leaf, it started to expand in its surface area, and when it was big enough for the princess to stand on, she knew that it had come from God, for her to make the trip to Cornwall.

There’s nothing known about the time between her leaving one shore and arriving at the next, but the story goes that she arrived at her destination before the other saints did, in their seaworthy boat. St Ia supposedly founded an Oratory in a clearing in a wood, on the site of the present‑day Parish Church. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that the town’s name was corrupted to St Ives.