Flag Paintings are paintings derived from the geometry of flags, painted onto used laminates and posters. In a Flag Painting, the unconscious overpainting comes, to cover up the conscious existing image, in a harmonious way. It is the existing conscious image that directs the unconscious, in both beautifying and destroying it.

Flags are symbolic of our effort in creating a representation of a boundary of inclusions and exclusions. The impossibility of such effort is comfortingly humorous, and our effort itself depressingly serious.

These paintings imagine identity as a cumulative process, and ask whether life is a violation, or an assimilation.

In The Rover, Joseph Conrad described melancholy as “this intimate inward sense of the vanity of all things”. If we can laugh at, and look seriously at, our own projections of vanity, we can become friends with them. The greatest vanity of all is the effort to conceal its presence in ourselves.