Sandeman trained at the Glasgow School of Art where she became close friends with Joan Eardley (1921-1963) and Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) with whom she collaborated. She began collaging text onto her paintings in 1973, and this in turn inspired Finlay to use collage. In this painting Sandeman’s grand-daughter Anna contemplates a poem written by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). The Latin line Opusculum paedagogum translates into ‘a little task for a pupil’. Sandeman believed that by framing a painting the artist was implying that it was an illusion and not directly part of the world of objects, so her works were intentionally unframed.