Seeing the contrast helped shape the new mission of Atkinson's art. He started working to expose such contradictions, and to remind people of their common history. Most of all, he hoped to initiate some actual changes. (On occasions, this has led to official positions: with the Arts Council of Great Britain, as Visual Arts Advisor to the Greater London Council, as Chairperson of the British Artists Union and on the National Committee of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science.) In 1981, Atkinson described the aim which he maintains as central: "The thing I try to do is render visible the invisible things which control the way we see."

Atkinson has never liked playing the elder statesman. He stays in touch with young artists and emerging trends. By the very end of the '80s, he was working with posters, huge versions of pages from the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal , Guardian and Le Figaro. He would "intervene" in their version of the news, replacing "official" commentators with art-world pundits - speakers such as Fra Angelico or Leonardo DA Vinci. Or, he would cover their "editorial" with the hues of money: solid columns of gold and copper and silver. In addition to appearing in galleries, these faux pages were also made up as posters. They were then mounted as advertisements in the bowels of London Underground.

The beginning of the '90s brought him fresh metaphors. Atkinson designed a set of banners for Glasgow's Sports Stadium, in which he depicted a typical set of footballers. Only this time, each wore a jersey with a provocative slogan (such as "Bizarre Politics Disguised as Actions" or "Competing Ideologies Often Take Bizarre Life Forms").

In 1992, his life changed dramatically - when he became Chair of the Department of Art at UC Davis. But that same year, he mounted a pair of exhibitions in Britain's West Yorkshire. They were commissioned by the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust and each was based around Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

Atkinson was intrigued by Brontë's life and the odd pedigree of her novel's central character. In a 1992 conversation with friend Peter Davies, formerly Britain's Head of Visual Arts of Northern Arts, he dissected this perennial "English classic" of literature:

"If you asked someone if Wuthering Heights is a classic English novel then you would have to say, Yes, I suppose it is...except it is written by a daughter of an immigrant and it is not really about an Englishman. It is about a person of unknown race who comes into this apparently civilized and domestic scene, a dark presence, and disrupts it. You could argue that this is a metaphor for immigration."

The Henry Moore Sculpture Trust is located in Halifax, amidst the landscape of Bronte's life and novel. Emily was the first-generation daughter of a fundamentalist preacher. (Like Atkinson's predecessors, Patrick Bronte had come from Ireland.) In the first-generation faces of '90s Anglo-Asians, Atkinson felt he had found her modern image. It helped him to re-frame the questions Wuthering Heights addresses.

Atkinson called his installations For Emily and Zones of Gold. Through them, he sought to reinstate the novel's centre - and to confront the still-burning question of "Englishness". In order to show how race and class can destroy destiny, the artist zeroed in on the race of Bront‘'s Heathcliff. Whereas the novel keeps Heathcliff's origins mysterious, for Atkinson he became an Asian Briton.

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