This painting is one of a group of twenty-six whose height represented in millimetres the number of names in the mailing list of the Richard Salmon Gallery in 1994, then at Studio 4, 59 South Edwardes Square, in Kensington, London. They were one of many parts of an installation I made for three spaces of the gallery, which was housed in a beautiful Victorian building especially built as artists studios, on a leafy private square. Each had many rooms with large windows.

This installation, that I called Would You, alluding to gentlemen's polite use of the conditional tense, was made for a group exhibition curated by Rear Window, a team of curators, and entitled Every Now and Then. It addressed the long history of the space. At the time one of its spaces had been, only a few months earlier, at Richard Salmon's invitation, Dereck Jarman's final studio, and his brushes, paints, smock and unfinished paintings were still there.

Looking for material to work with, I focussed on everything that could be secret in Richard Salmon's business and in finding ways of representing it. When I asked Richard Salmon what was it that he considered secret, he told me it was his mailing list, his correspondence, those he sold to, and for how much. I started from there.

Another space, with the walls that I covered entirely with potpourri, showed his correspondence with another gallerist, Karsten Schubert, his ex-business partner, with whom he was having a nasty falling-out. Their letters and faxes were so heavily redacted by both as to be practically unreadable. Another part of the work also showed a correspondence, this one fictional, between a model and the artist who worked in the studio, a Charles Edward Holmer. She had left her earrings behind after modelling and would like to retrieve them, but Holmer never replied to her mail and when she tried to go by the studio and knock at the door neither him nor his assistant Henry were ever in. Her name was Mara Tsvetskova, a Bulgarian. Her name was given to me by someone I didn't know and went to meet for the express purpose of finding a convincing Bulgarian name. That was Valeri Tchukov, a Bulgarian who worked at Bush House, on the Strand, in the Bulgarian Service of the BBC, and who was a friend of my friend Steven Moore, to whom I had confided that I wanted her to be Bulgarian but I didn't know a single Bulgarian, came to my rescue and gave me Mara.

Contrary to my expectations, the correspondence between Richard Salmon and Karsten Schubert was taken for a fiction, and Mara's small blue paper letters written with purple ink taken for real.

Thirty-one years later, this painting could forget its own story and be happy to celebrate a Walter, a Wendy, a Winston, a Wallid or Waldemar.