In 2025, I submitted a piece of parquet from a former mission hall engraved ‘BENEATH THE PARQUET, THE DANCE FLOOR‘. A reference to the 1968 Situationist ‘Sous les Pavés, la Plage!’ (Under the cobbles, the beach!). My hope was that the selection committee might see fit to pull up a block of gallery floor and swap it for my work. They didn’t. Nevertheless, I carried it along to an event and took a photo of it in situ, on top of the parquet. It’s on my shelf now, I’m not sure I’d ever want to sell it.
This year, I’d been thinking again about Burlington House and something that had always bothered me about the Central Hall, which is that it isn’t an octagon. It’s a square room with walls added to each corner. It puts on the airs and graces of a more fanciful shape, but in that vanity, it loses surface area, because behind the corners are four quite substantial voids.
I researched old drawings, studied more recent plans from the Chipperfield masterplan and spoke to another architect, but the voids remained a mystery. It looks like one might be part of a ventilation or heating system, one contains some kind of round structure, but the others are empty as far as I can tell. Creepy to think of them hollow, full of dust or lost Academicians. This is free space in one of the main galleries that could let more artists into the show. The work became about their absence and then finding a means to connect them with that space.
The Academy’s walls have held up (and no doubt seen) so much over the years, so considering the other side of the partitions felt appropriate. My first plan was to try to imagine an entire secondary exhibition in the void, but impossible to curate that without access. There could be mirrors to extend the space, lighting, audio, the muffled sobs and chatter of the unselected and forgotten. But if the committee isn’t going to pull up one block of floor, they’re not going to take apart a wall are they, so I thought I’d claim the spaces on paper instead.
I produced a loose leaf erratum slip to be added to the list of works. Errata because it’s four omission categories/four voids. To follow the format of previous catalogues, I bought a previous copy on eBay, but when it arrived, it only had a partial cover. “As you suspected, I cut through the cover when trimming the cardboard packaging to size, I suppose the cover was sticking up and I didn’t notice. I found this [section of cover] on the desk when I got home.” The seller was apologetic, but the catalogue of disasters he replied with was a great addition to the erroneousness of the work.
“Thursday was an all round bad day. Not enough sleep, rushing to get some chores done (including packing this little booklet) before going to the airport, then the real catastrophe of getting to Stansted airport only to find that my flight was from Luton and not enough time to get from one to the other. Total cost £250 to get another flight and train and taxi and missing one of the three days of the athletics competition that I went to watch. Still the other two days of athletics were very good with Sunday being exceptional. So all OK really. Hope you find another one. Sorry once again.”
When Errata was shortlisted, I printed the 100 sheets, numbered and signed the back of each one. The RA asks for work to be framed, but I wanted this to be stuck up loose with pins or tape. I did the closest I could by sawing a scrappy piece of ‘back wall’ in chipboard to match the dimensions of a frame and pinned the slip to it. When I dropped it off, the box contained the stack of 99 papers and a ‘framed’ slip with a note on the front to let them know the wall-mounted piece was optional.
The curator this year is Ryan Gander, an artist I’m sure is making some kind of mischief with the 250-year-old format. Now Errata has made it into the show, I don’t know what to expect on Varnishing Day tomorrow. Will it even be on the wall? I don’t mind too much, as it belongs in the book, for the rejected, the unsubmitted, the indifferent and the abandoned. The price is set at £400 for the framed piece (arbitrarily, 10x entry fee). The copies in the booklets are free to whoever finds them.
In other work, aside from writing, I’ve been making some drawings and revisiting a mail art project I started 30 years ago. I couldn’t decide whether it was a dead end, I was a bit stuck, until by coincidence, I saw a page that related to it in an issue of Real Review. I don’t know Jack Self, but thought I’d email him and see what he suggested. He replied with some kind advice, which I’m slowly working on – turning it into an artist’s book, planning a low-key event. I’m being deliberately vague as other work keeps getting in the way and I’m not much closer to finishing it. But the thing that stuck with me was a point he made about his grandfather playing the fiddle. And the few things that people remember of us.
Which feels relevant now, because even if someone holds my work up as everything wrong and won’t someone just think of the painters, you just have to keep having ideas don’t you. I trust Ryan will do something interesting, possibly brave. And my parents are proud I have something in the Royal Academy, though don’t ask too much about what. In fact, lots of people have been really nice in congratulating me. Then I think, wait until you see it. You might be surprised that the sophisticated octagon is, in fact, a simple square with extensions.
Sarah Simpkin
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