The former carpet factory in which he worked provided a central vision: to design and commission two large carpets, with help from the Asian community. As finished pieces, displayed to form an equal sign (=), these contained 15 colours woven in a pattern of text, knives and animal figures. Wrote the Bradford City Art Gallery's Nima Poovaya-Smith, "The motifs link them with Islamic carpets, particularly prayer mats which are woven with calligraphic designs. The calligraphy usually embodies passages from the Koran and serves a talismanic purpose."

When displayed, the carpets were supported by a flock of "Welcome" signs, allusions to the subcontinent's "welcome" symbols: writings in rice flour; strings of mango leaves; and mats of coir. In Zones of Gold, there was also a wall of windows: Emily Bront‘'s symbol for seeing while excluded. (Heathcliff and Cathy, joined, look in on a richer family, one whose status will eventually part them. Later, Cathy's ghost hammers at another window, in a desperate search for reunion.) Atkinson filled his windows with different hands. Their palms were painted with henna, in the Asian mehindi tradition. But they contained Emily Bront‘'s words - in Urdu.

If the Urdu, the calligraphy and the text invoked the Islamic world, a complementary installation of freezers invoked the Christian. Placed in the shape of a cross, these contained gilded shoes, gilded books and golden trophies - parodies of awards from the British sporting world. On them appeared speech familiar from everyday life ("I don't understand men"), side-by-side with phrases taken directly from Wuthering Heights ("Shall my heart quarrel with my pulse?").

Critics saw here Britain's best sort of public art: inventive and imaginative; modern yet historical. It was modern "sampling", with a political purpose - but that purpose was considered and inclusive. Atkinson always aims for such accessibility, but he knows the work is never simple. His tools - as well as his targets - now include e-mail, multimedia formats and the World Wide Web.

These connect the world, he knows, yet do not necessarily unify. Or, as he now puts it, "We have to recognise that truth is obscured, it's not easy to recognise. Its use as a weapon is shot through with contradictions."

In the autumn of 1995, on a visit to Washington, DC, Atkinson was introduced to several Vietnam War Veterans. They began to tell him about the world wide problem of land mines, and their campaign - started in 1991 - to ban them. "Then," he remembers, "one of them showed me an actual mine. It was the Valmora, a genre manufactured in Italy." The Valmora mine, he heard, is also known as the "Bouncing Betty" - because it springs up to explode at eye level. To quote Fielding's Guide to The Most Dangerous Places, it then releases "a lethal explosion of ball bearings, killing everything within 25 meters and wounding everything else within 200 meters."

Atkinson was horrified, yet fascinated. When, in 1996, he was commissioned by Carlisle City Art Gallery and Museum, he decided to proceed from a pun: mining culture. Working with West Cumbria's Mining Advisory Group, and ceramicist Paul Scott, he fabricated his own kind of "Bouncing Bettys" - delicate facsimiles which bear iconic cultural images. They range from that stylized English classic, the "Willow Pattern", to Albrecht Durer's doughty "Praying Hands". All the images he used were familiar as "culture", including a painting of a blond child by Renoir. The image Atkinson saved for that mine, however, was outsize. So he "cut the child's legs off and set them beside the rest of her image." His new artifact reflected its model's real-life purpose.

continues

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