Early in 1973 I had a phone call from the Midland group gallery in Nottingham saying that they were celebrating their anniversary with an exhibition of flags and would like me to design one for the show: I accepted the invitation and after only a few hours reflection remembered all the flags I had seen fluttering on postcards, each one a Union Jack but in fantastic ways eroded by the stages of offset lithography, brutalised by the tinter's brush, or fragmented and faded beyond recognition by some earlier graphic process. I therefore decided to reconstruct such a flag (flying in fact on a postcard of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin). I made a drawing to indicate how the flag in question would look were it to be flattened out and the gallery had a full size one professionally made from the design.

Looking through postcards of beflagged public buildings in London I found that the Union Jack was capable of hundreds of variations, each seemingly acceptable by the public (at least on the scale that they appear on a card) as the British flag. In trying to reconstruct the hypothetical flat appearance of these mutilations the principal difficulty was to decide what happened in the parts of the design hidden from view as they furled and billowed in the wind. I made intermediary relief maquettes on which I could conjecture the parts concealed. Gouaches were made from these which could be said to reconstruct those absurd flying objects flying on top of the Houses of Parliament or the Tower of London, taken down as it were and ironed out. In order to complete the cycle (flag flying photographed/photograph printed retouched/postcard purchased scrutinised/model of flying flag made/model conjectured flat/flat flag painted) these images should ideally be returned to their true size and be made of cloth. It was around this time that I had been making tapestries with the Edinburgh Tapestry Co. And this seemed the ideal way in which the flags could both 'come home' to cloth and remain remote as art objects. Two of the original twelve designs were executed by Herera and Ovahimba of Narimbia.

In 1974 I made a version of the other flag present on that postcard of Checkpoint Charlie, the Stars and Stripes, which was silk-screened on to cloth with the image (in reverse) printed on the verso. Yet another print shows a selection of the source material much enlarged (some of the flags I worked on were less than half a centimetre long) the sixteen union jacks appearing with their (often equally remarkable) skies in a vexillologist's nightmare.  > >

Works/Texts (1992), p. 67-69

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