A while ago I bought a 30/25 inch portrait for the frame. The canvas was a total wreck. But I saved the face because it feels wrong to throw a portrait away if anything can be salvaged. It’s as if you’re condemning the sitter to oblivion. But then it turned out he was a slave trader. His name was on the frame – an associate of James Knight. As an icon of a person it was now entirely distasteful. But you still can’t destroy an old painting – for one thing it’s an artist’s work – so Zak pasted him to the inside of an old writing slope we never use. Shut in the dark. Keeping the image but punishing it ritually and symmetrically. The hatch is faced with a piece of chinoiserie wallpaper that Zak found by the bins. He couldn’t use it for any other purpose because it would be culturally insensitive. Here all its resonances make it entirely appropriate.

It creates a sort of allegory of objects, provenance and the human cost of luxury. The monster in the early modern attic. A horrible thing. He rarely sees the light but we never forget he’s there.