Naming the Money (Figures 56–58) is probably the most important work I’ve ever made, but for more personal reasons than its scale and reach. The period through which the work took place was one of reflection and development, and perhaps if I’m honest it was a moment at which I thought it would be the last installation I’d ever undertake. By the time it had been shown at the Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University I was approaching 50 and had spent the previous five years trying to build on the opportunity of the Tate St Ives residency and show; it was very different work but seemed none the less to be the culmination of a massive output which included shows such as Zanzibar, Plan B, Inside the Invisible, Double Life and Cotton.com. To some extent it was a way of combining and developing all the ideas from these exhibitions into an installation of operatic proportions. Both Inside the Invisible, which addressed what it is to be named as a leper, and Cotton.com, which concerned itself with the lives of slaves and factory workers, were each 100-work series. Double Life and Zanzibar explored my family heritage through a structure of nine diptychs and extensive examination of my early life through intense conversations with my mother and aunt. Plan B was all about what it meant to try to make radical changes to what was a dangerous existence apparently completely without hope.

The making and subsequent showing of Naming the Money allowed for a much more accessible debate about what it means to belong. It raised questions about what it means to be taken from one life and thrust into another. The painting and naming of one hundred men and women (which I did myself) allowed me to build and develop and even nurture a family in a way that I’d never quite managed previously. I invented each of the five-line narratives using my own experience of dealing with the pain of absence and loss, of trying to understand how to fathom the complex issues around what it means to belong. The matching of each text to each of the painted people involved long hours writing ‘poems’ for wooden figures with as much care as if the figures had been real; to me they are real.