On a visit to Weston-super-Mare in the early 1970s, the American artist Susan Hiller came across an old postcard depicting the Somerset resort lashed by rough seas. She soon found another in (and of) Brighton, and realized she had hit on a quaint vernacular genre with echoes of Romantic sublimity. In the hundreds of postcards that Hiller subsequently amassed for her installation “Dedicated to the Unknown Artists”, seafronts both garish and prim are assaulted by huge waves, masses of foam that menace the harbour-side hotels of Margate, Whitby, Herne Bay. Hiller arranged these images in grids, drew maps showing the locations of the coastal towns in question, and tabulated such details as caption and format: vertical or horizontal. Occasionally she revealed a handwritten inscription: “It has been really like this today, had splendid time”.

“Dedicated to the Unknown Artists” signalled Hiller’s commitment to a type of romantic conceptualism, a mix of organizing rigour, visual interest and intense emotional appeal. At four decades’ remove it is hard to recapture what an affront the latter two qualities were to the more austere conceptualists of the period. Hiller was accused of a sentimental attachment to the image per se, a Pop-derived reliance on mundane cultural artefacts and a ruinous attraction to affect. If such taunts seem absurd now, the artists and critics who voiced them were right in a way: Hiller’s art is usually poised between ideas and embodiment, reason and ravishment.

At the Lisson Gallery there is a recent offshoot of the rough seas project in “On the Edge” (2015): a collection of 482 views of 219 locations, arranged in grids on fifteen panels. Hiller had a retrospective at Tate Britain in 2011, and the current show seems a more modest summation of her long-standing methods, themes and motifs. She moved to London at the end of the 1960s after an education in photography, linguistics, archaeology and anthropology; in retrospect she seems to have been well trained for the theoretical rigours of the day, but time and again her work proposed “adventures and deformations”, digressions from the conceptual to the material, emotional and (most famously) paranormal.

In 1999, in an essay on Andrei Tarkovsky, Hiller wrote: “I like to work with materials that have been culturally repressed or misunderstood, what’s been relegated to the lunatic fringe or what’s so boring we can’t even look at it anymore”....