Flags for the Ruins
Land of Sighs and Laughter
2023
acrylic dye on cotton, polyester trim and grommets
33 x 18 inches
variable edition of 2
This is an ongoing series of handwoven flags for a fictional place called Unum, where the ideas of belonging, identity, and boundaries are being redefined following disaster.
Flag design is a utopian exercise that allows me to imagine a future in which the environmental crisis has led to more than just suffering. What if, after the storm, we also find joy, beauty, and a deepening of our humanity?
Since they are woven, the flags are made of “whole cloth”—not stitched together but conceived and constructed as one fabric, their stripes, text, and imagery embedded in the structure. Here, I use the weaving process as metaphor for unity and transformation. These flags announce a hopeful longing for the emergence of our interconnectedness with Earth and each other.
Winds of Being
2023
glitch-woven cotton, iridescent embroidery thread, polyester trim and grommets
29 x 19 inches
The broken scallop shell is a recurring motif in my work, one that I adopted while living in Tallahassee, in solitude near the beaches of Florida’s Forgotten Coast. Shells are powerful symbols in our collective unconscious, used in ancient spiritual traditions to represent fertility and the afterlife. I use the shell fragment as a metaphor for creative struggle. It’s a dwelling, a skirt, a shield, a document, a slow-eroding exoskeleton.
Scallops are flag-like in their waving stripes, but unlike fabric, a shell is rigid, a picture of undulation rather than the motion itself. Its syncopated colors tell a coded narrative of the animal’s life, a record of its environment and its efforts at sheltered growth.
Shells ask us to consider what will remain. How will the things we make outlive us, moving in the world after we have become still?
“By staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.” (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space)
Land of Sighs and Laughter
variable edition, 1 of 2
2023
acrylic dye on cotton, polyester trim and grommets
33 x 18 inches
reversible, both sides shown above
Unum is a country where backwards is forwards and both is at once. Its alphabet contains only symmetrical letters and can be written from left or right. The citizenry is fluent in dialectics. There is no stress from cognitive dissonance in the land of sighs and laughter.
This flag imagines a more utopian form of nationalism. I pledge allegiance to the breath. Subtly referencing the American flag, its stripes and lettering are reversible, its meaning more ambiguous. Depending on which side you stand, the exhales have different meanings.
Land of Sighs and Laughter
variable edition, 2 of 2
2023
acrylic dye on cotton, polyester trim and grommets
36 x 18 inches
reversible, both sides shown above
Ecco
2023
glitch-woven cotton and tencel, with polyester trim and grommets
31 x 58 inches
Inspired by Pamela Colman Smith’s death flag, the tudor rose is replaced by a shadowy figure of seashell fragments. The shells were drawn from observation and printed with dye onto yarn that was carefully measured in order for the image to be reconstructed at the loom.
The flag is a call to witness, to spend time in attention, with the latin “ECCO” the command, “behold.” It’s also a homonym for “echo” and “eco-.”
The exhalations AH and HA—pain and pleasure—create a subtle pattern that reverses from left to right and front to back. This text is coded into the structure of the cloth.