Tatters is one of the paintings made by Victor Willing during a year long residency at Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge. At this time the artist described ideas for his paintings as coming to him fully formed, like 'visions', these he quickly put down as drawings which then became the basis for large scale canvases such as this one. Willing's paintings from the late 1970s and early 1980s have a dream-like intensity and the appearance of theatrical settings, full of tension. Here objects drape awkwardly over a line of string and others are impaled on hooks, there is the suggestion of hiding implied by the screen in the background and of destruction - the 'tatters' on the floor.