You know a piece hasn't come together when you have to explain it.

The red coats are called "pinks".
Too much is almost enough.
— Frederick Seidel, 'Kill Poem'

Those lines fired off an interesting cluster of associations: fox-hunting (Seidel's writing about its traditional garb), Britain its country, its erstwhile empire (the 'pink bits' on the globe), and the blood and poppies (of wartime or of the opium trade) by which it was upheld.

And I'd wanted to do a hot-palette picture like the ones Phylum does so well; converging orange fur, red coat and blue/red flag towards pink sounded like fun.

Then, for a fictional frame, I thought of Sibyl (early thirties, mid-90s with her conceptual art career riding high) doing a photo series of posed self-portrait playing on the same concepts.

Then I drew it... and it didn't work. It's meant to be ambiguous and critical, but instead it looks proud and celebratory; like strongly-posed portraits usually do. Should've thought of that. I couldn't find a simple way to problematise the image, and by that stage the juice didn't seem worth the squeeze.

So, I granted Sibyl the same doubts and the same artistic indolence, and had her scrap the shoot and offer a few reflections of her own.