Conjectured Pictures: The Mappin Wall

The original postcard, acquired 1970

Postcard Composition 2A
(conjectured rescue from Sheffield Art Gallery)
watercolour
1970

The Mappin Art Gallery
(outline of painting project)
screenprint
17.5 x 21.5 cm
1974

No. 6
150 x 120 cm
1974

Conjectured picture Mappin Art Gallery No. 3
(Mr Mappin and his dog)
acrylic on canvas
216 x 160 cm
1974

Installation at Serpentine Gallery, London
600 x 800 cm
1975

Mappin Art Gallery wallpaper [A.P.]
colour photo lithograph
86.6 x 67.2 cm
1976

Mappin Art Gallery
reproduction on postcard
1987

This description in adapated from Works & Texts 1992 p63-66 

In 1970 I acquired a postcard (Scott series no.2 published in Birmingham, printed in Hessen) of the interior of the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield. The pictures shown hanging in the gallery are so reduced in scale, so simplified by the high contrast black and white underlying halftone and so distorted in colour by the crudely registered and arbitrarily decided tints applied in Hessen (evidently by colourists who had no knowledge of the pictures in question), that although some are still identifiable as landscape or portrait at a generalised level, most are obscurely cryptic.

In May of that year I made the first transcription of one of these spectral images in a mood of casual curiosity. This watercolour so intrigued me with its wild composition and impenetrable subject matter that I started making versions of the other paintings on the central wall. Eventually the wall itself became the motif and I set about reconstructing it life-size, limiting myself to the ghostly information that the card contained.

At a magnification of approximately x 120, I was building whole dream worlds of romance and imagined action from little more than a cluster of dots like dark stars on the creamy sky of the card's own surface.

I found in Sheffield’s city archives the original black and white photograph on which the card had been based. This demonstrated that some of the most prominent features of the pictures shown were in fact accidents of lighting (caught reflections in the glass of the frames of bright incidents from the opposite wall).

Since there was often little demarcation between picture and frame, or even on occasions between frame and wall, in the blurred world of the card I was working from, I decided it would be better to make the frames part of the paintings. All I could make out of the wall that the pictures were hanging on was a faint patterning  of regular blobs. I copied a section and had it printed to scale. Thus the complete version of Conjectured Pictures: The Mappin Wall involves hanging the wallpaper and arranging the pictures according to a plan. This was first done at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1975. When later I had an exhibition at the Mappin Art Gallery itself the installation came home to occupy its original space.