For this 61st exhibition Paul R Jones, from North Wales offers us Baner Llecynnau.
Paul says: For Lands of the Free, I am presenting the flag Baner Llecynnau and a digital print that explores concepts of territoriality. The Baner Llecynnau employs the colours of the Welsh National Flag whilst also using structural elements from the flags of the Czech Republic, Palestine, and the Brunei Republican Rebellion. The digital print is part of a series I’ve made that explores the imagery associated with frontiers.
Frontiers serve as incubators for a volatile mix of expanding territorial ambitions and clashing identities. At these edges, flags are often raised, forcefully communicating ownership – both of the land and the future. They declare that this is where your reality ends, and our domain begins. The frontier, while often evoking picturesque tropes of promised lands, also harbors terror. It becomes a battleground where the colonial conquest poses a threat to all that is surveyed. The terror of the frontier lies in its power to completely erase native histories, entitlements, and deities. It transforms into a place where the indigenous people’s histories are wholly erased, becoming a haunting ‘site of terror.’
In essence, territoriality serves as an apparatus for establishing spatial systems of control. The symbiotic interplay of flags, frontiers, and territoriality reveals a complex narrative, where symbols of ownership and spatial dominance not only delineate borders but also highlight the delicate relationship between power, nationhood, and the ongoing struggle for control.
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Exhibition 60 – Elspeth Owen
OUT of the BLUE by MEOW. Curated by Soraya Smithson
OUT of the BLUE – my letter arrives with an invitation to you, my friends and relations who are scattered around the world: please send me a picture postcard of your place with a message on the theme of ‘The lands of the Free?’
OUT of the BLUE – your cards arrive in UFFINGTON and Kate Genever sends them on to me.
OUT of the BLUE – your cards are higgledy-piggledy on the Noticeboard, showing your dreams of sea and sky and spires, and your messages are flying from the flagpole, glinting and shimmering in the wind and the sun, celebrating the freedom through the air of your trickster words.
LONG LIVE the POSTAL SERVICES!
One of those people I invited to send a postcard would not be contained, as well as her card she wrote me this letter.
“ . . . . . Sometimes you see something so miraculous you want to tell everyone . . . . . I was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka which was for much of my life ravaged by civil war . . . . {one of the towns} is Batticaloa on the north east coast, surrounded by beaches, a lagoon, it is a magical place, home to mermaids and singing fish.
Every morning at 9am in Batticaloa a group of women walk the same route through the city centre. The walk begins at the Catholic Church, winds through the main roads of the town and ends at the Gandhi Memorial Park. The women walk single file, in silence, with signs around their necks.
The walk began on 12th of May 2022, following the brutal crackdown on protests that happened when the previous prime minister was ousted. . . . . A state of emergency was declared and a curfew imposed. The women walked in silence with signs protesting the new government and the oppressive policies.
I joined the walk, known locally as the Justice Walk, in February. By then it had been running for over 650 days. Every morning for a week I walked the route, many days with the sign about Palestine around my neck . . . .When you asked me about “The lands of the Free?”, I thought about the Justice Walk. How protest is both a vigil mourning the state of the world but also a distant billboard on which we paint our hopes for a better one. And that even in the most unfree of lands, every morning at 9am, a group of women walk silently through a magical town, not quite destroyed by war.”
Elspeth Owen works as a potter near Cambridge and under the name material woman she makes long distance journeys to deliver special messages and significant objects. www.imaginedcorners.net
This installation is their combined work – MaterialElspethOwenWoman – MEOW. They are currently involved in the Defend Our Juries campaign www.defendourjuries.org
Exhibition 59 – Naomi Frears
Curated by Soraya Smithson Exhibition 59 is by Naomi Frears. Naomi says: “It has been fun wondering what to put or say on a flag. I love making work in new ways and have asked lots of people what kind of flag they would make. It really makes people think.
When I explain that someone lives near the flagpole, the idea of being quite rude about right wing politics – a natural urge – has had to make way for something that won’t encourage eggs to be thrown. I don’t have flag making skills, so talked to a local flag company. All parts of their business are as sustainable and ethical as possible, so I have tried to overlook the fact that the flag is made of some kind of spooky recycled fabric.
The words on the flag are from one of my text works. They relate to the theme The Lands of the Free in that, in our society we are able ask politely for a person, people, or a state to stop doing things we don’t like or find irritating. It may not transform behaviour, but we can let someone know something we’d like them to think about changing. A conversation might start. Sometimes the request might be impossible, but we can still ask. Here on the noticeboard is a tiny part of a very long list of what those undesirable things might be. What would you ask a person, people, or a state politely not to do?“
Naomi Frears is based in the Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall. Her practice includes work with film and video, as well as printmaking, painting, and collaborative curatorial projects. Recent solo shows and film commissions include Men Falling (Artist Moving Image Commission, Exeter Phoenix) and In Other Words, a film commission for RAMM (Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter), Red River, a film commission in collaboration with poet John Wedgwood Clarke shown at COP 26, Looking for Ray, for Kestle Barton, and Somebody Loves Us All, a film commission and collaboration with poet Ella Frears, Bold Tendencies, Peckham. She undertook a large painting commission for Hospital Rooms at Bethlam Royal Hospital, London and her work appears regularly on the cover of the London Review of Books. Frears’ work is held in public and private collections including The Government Art Collection and in 2023 she was nominated for the Film London Jarman Award for artists moving image. Frears teaches art students at Falmouth University and among other projects, she is currently making new work as a guest of Britten Pears Arts in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
Exhibition 58 – Esther Wilson
hbition 58: Esther Wilson – Quilt flag
Quilts are connected to Women’s work. A quilt speaks of domestic labour, of clothing and comforting and providing and nourishing children. They are a creative output with a practical application. A pieced quilt can be a record of a family’s life and a woman’s emotions. Quilts hold history and track lives. They are a family record held in your hands; a connection passed down through cloth.
Making this piece I thought of the children wrapped in white shrouds, cradled by their mothers during the genocide in Gaza. I thought of the loss of stitched history, the devastation of domestic textiles. Children’s bedding destroyed, soft toys disfigured and curtains turned ashen grey.
Red is a colour used extensively in Palestinian Tatreez. Red is a colour of danger, bravery and passion. Pink is a colour of sensitivity, of femininty, of childhood.
The land of the free? Are our mothers free? Are we free within a world that allows genocide?
Esther is a London based artist and dressmaker. She trained in Embroidery at the Royal School of Needlework (2017) She makes work, both wearable and unwearable, looking at grief, motherhood and domesticity.
Exhibition 57 – Anna Reading
Exhbition 57: Anna Reading. The Lands of the Free?
Anna’s work deals with issues around anthropocentric perspectives and the subsequent impacts upon environments, bodies, and human psyches. Her work looks to more-than-human life forms for lessons in survival within hostile settings.
When invited to create a work for the specificity of a flagpole, I wanted to situate the work within the landscape for which it would be shown. The work is based on a walk along the flood plain of the river Welland, running South of Uffington. The walk was an attempt to explore a landscape where the notion of free-ness(?) could be explored through flow, flux and entropy. During the walk, I encountered multiple examples of entanglements; sheeps wool wrapped around fences, grasses caught in seed heads, creepers entwined around branches, sedges matted in mud clumps. All of this material stuck-ness was activated by sunlight and a healthy breeze. My sculptural intervention explores what it is to be entangled, both as a restriction to movement while also a support system.
I am drawn to the contradictions inherent within the notion of the ‘Free?’ and what that means in terms of a ‘Land’. In an attempt to physically deconstruct the official fixedness of a flag, the work features materials which playfully interact with the weather, a sun-reflective rigid aluminium flag shape, and protective roofing felt tendrils to be activated by the wind. The notice board features a woven roofing felt and metal textile, entwined with loose materials collected along the River Welland’s flood plain.
Anna Reading is a Newcastle-born artist, now living and working in London. She holds an MfA in Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art (2017) and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Central St Martins (2010). Reading is the winner of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2018-19. www.annareading.co.uk
Exhibition 56 – Soraya Smithson
Title: Flags, notice boards, quilts and the power of Symbols.
Soraya Smithson is a multi-disciplinary artist with a studio 2.6 miles from the Notice Board and Flag Pole. She is a member of Leicester Print Workshop and uses a council run ceramic studio also in Leicester. Her work led by ideas; first the what, then the how, then the why.
Art is all about colours and symbols. Whilst researching the suffrage movement for a commission in 2018 I was struck by the power of repeated colours to convey a message. From this my mind turned to the use of fabric, colour and pattern in propaganda. And from there to banners as spaces of protest and then to the interlocking pattern blocks in quilts that were used as subversive message bearers during the American Civil War.
So when I was offered a flag pole on which to display a flag, that was my starting point. From my initial thoughts on the meanings of fabric, symbols and colour I came up with a design for a flag with 18 variants, and also a mini-quilt made from the scraps of these flags. I wanted to explore the strong iconography of flags themselves, the Venus symbol representing female gender, and the evocation of a particular colour combination, green white and violet, using fabric, print and sewing.
Humankind are pareidolic animals – they perceive, analyse and interpret patterns. Signs and symbols surround us. Signs give information or instruction, symbols represent something, something that might need context to understand. All symbols, colours and shapes come with historical meanings that are ever evolving and changing in meaning and uses. This constant shifting, via adoption, reappropriation, re-assignment and re-framing, makes fixed understanding and interpretation complicated.
Neither the colours of The Women’s Suffrage and Political Union nor the female gender symbol have been immune from appropriation to new causes to mean something other than originally intended.
The flags are screen-printed on Cotton Percale and then hand edged. The quilt is made up of six handsewn blocks.
Exhibition 55 – Kate Buckley & Joana Cifre Cerdà
waves
in nowhere
______(feels like home)
wordless
________ly__
___at play
in the open
air
_________ ungraspable
Wavy (old marigold gloves, waterproof fabric, thread, whipping twine, rope and old tarpaulin).
Kate Buckley and Joana Cifre Cerdà have been making and doing things together, bumbling along, tinkering with ideas, materials, gestures, etc… for about 12 years. They find explaining their work difficult because as soon as they attempt to fix it in a description it seems to escape any containment. Images and thoughts come and go, they play with them.
Kate and Joana are based in Boston and Middle Rasen, Lincolnshire, and are part of the Lincoln based artist led studio General Practice.
Takeover
For 6 months Soraya Smithson will curate the Notice Board using the quizzical ‘The Lands of the Free?’ theme. Soraya says: This is a provocation to react, condemn and fight against injustices, corruption, oppression, traitorous words and deeds. Many gender equalities and freedoms have been won, however not universally. Many are still promised, compromised or reneged upon. All too often Women and those Othered are the first to suffer violence, marginalisation and the indignity of powerlessness. For this reason, my choice of artists are all women.
February = Kate Buckley & Joana Cifre-Cerda
March = Soraya Smithson
April = Anna Reading
May = Esther Wilson
June – Naomi Frears & Ella Frears
July – Elspeth Owen Potter
Exhbition 54 – Craig Fisher
Remains features two works:
Remains [Brick Wall Rubble] 2024. Patchworked and painted cotton and
Remains [Broken Window] 2024. Patchworked and painted canvas
They form part of a series of textile works whose meanings appear to slip and slide. The Notice Board asks:
Are they figurative descriptions or abstract patterns?
Are they dumb soft things or subversive hard things?
Are they funny or not?
Are they representations of gentle ruination or of places purposely destroyed?
Whichever way, The Notice Board is interested in:
How current affairs across the globe affect them.
How this village context changes them.
How it might feel to live with or near broken windows.
How patchwork and patchworking has always been a political.
How abstraction and pattern can appear in the unlikeliest of places.
Craig says: I’m interested in how these works (panel and flag) hover in an in-between space, acting as figurative representations (a broken brick wall and a smashed window) while at the same time being patterned formal abstractions. Ideas of destruction or ruination are juxtaposed with decorative motifs and craft techniques from textiles. I often draw inspiration and reference artists such as Philip Guston and have become particularly interested in his use of recurring motifs such as the brick wall. By employing an image of a fragmented brick wall within the flag work, it asks us to consider borders or boundaries and the futility of containment. The panel of a smashed window forms part of my fascination with the architectural ruin and abandoned spaces, it raises questions about violence and intentional decay.
Craig Fisher is an artist, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader BA (Hons) Fine Art at University of Derby. He lives in Nottingham and is a studio holder at PRIMARY. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. In 2022, Fisher had solo exhibitions, FLAT SPACE, at Abingdon Studios Project Space Blackpool and a space in a space in a space at Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham. Recent group exhibitions include, An Elastic Continuum S1 Artspace, Sheffield (2023); A Generous Space, Hastings Contemporary and inclusion in touring exhibition, Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2021 (both 2021).
Exhibition 53 – Andy Parker
A Rock From An Island
Maritime Distress flag (with sleeves): Embroidered shirt, rope, wooden toggle.
A Rock From An Island: Folded giclee print on paper.
Andy says: A rock sits behind a glass panel embedded in the wall of a museum in Turku, Finland. It has been moved 17,000km from the Island of Pourewa on the east coast of New Zealand. It’s surface looks sea washed, smooth and white, and it sits on a bed of light pink and grey pebbles (their origin is not recorded). This rock commemorates Herman Spöring Junior, a watchmaker from Turku in Finland. He sailed on Captain Cook’s first voyage, during which Cook re-named Pourewa ‘Spöring Island’. Herman was the first person from Turku recorded in this part of the world but he died on the way home and was buried at sea.
On Eastney seafront in Portsmouth, not far from where I was born, fortifications of concrete and steel, angled to repel hostile military forces, jut into the rising water, sliding, fissured, smashed smoothed and sinking. The tide races between this point and Hayling Island opposite, the water heaping up as it rushes to fill Langstone Harbour and the salt flats which cut Portsea Island from the mainland beyond. I lift a smooth lump of concrete from the water’s edge into my arms. Rounded pebbles of unknown origin are exposed on its surface. The rock is moved 127km to my friend Sam’s studio in London, where he helps me photograph it to make a poster as a reminder of the rock behind the glass panel embedded in the wall of a museum in Turku, Finland.
I printed this work for The Notice Board as I was thinking about time, territory and the sea. Studying the Flood Map website I could see that, left unchecked, rising sea levels would leave the flag and noticeboard on a promontory reaching into the North Sea at the wide mouth of the River Welland. By this time Portsmouth would be inundated, the rock in Turku would be under water and the Island of Pourewa would be divided into two, smaller, islands. Herman Spöring would still be buried at sea, but it would be a different shape sea and there would be different stories.
The Maritime Distress flag (with sleeves). Onboard ship, flags are a source of useful coloured material, and I have seen examples with shaped holes cut out to fashion other items at sea. One man I know used to cut all the white material from enormous naval flags to use as dust sheets. This work, a maritime distress flag which is 30 miles from the sea, takes this repurposing in a new direction. Its form as a shirt alludes to a missing body, its empty, flapping arms a frantic wave for help. The absent vessel suggests a wider context; a flag flown from the deck of a vast floundering vessel floating in space…
Andy Parker is an artist based in Somerset. He grew up in Portsmouth; his dad was a sailor in the Royal Navy and his mum is from the tiny South Atlantic Island of St Helena. With a nautical backdrop and a passion for unpicking and re-tangling history, his practice often turns toward the coast for its inspiration. He has been selected to exhibit at galleries including Arnolfini in Bristol, Outpost in Norwich and Studio Voltaire in London. His work is held in public and private collections including the V&A, the British Museum, and Deutsche Bank in London, and the Frangenberg Collection in Cambridge. andyp.co.uk