Flagging up ideas on art & identity

Street finds make exhibition

AN artist is flying the flag for exploring identity and national pride in a new exhibition.

John Baucher, who lives in East Belfast, came up with the idea after picking up an eyelet from a lamp-post – a remnant of the flag that had once flown there.

The 53-year-old said: “I have been finding and retrieving flags for seven or eight years now and started thinking of them as a resource, a means of communication and this work really stemmed from that. I am working with found, gifted and retrieved flags and remnants.

“I walked past the lamp-post this flag was on three or four times a week over five or six years, then one day walked past and this fragment was lying there.

“At this stage I had already found a number of flags but didn’t know what to do with them, there doesn’t seem to be any protocol over that properly. This got me thinking, I then did a bit of research and came up with this quote from the US Navy code which says, ‘Worship the last thread as a relic’, and putting it in a frame like that and removing it from where it was, reimaging it, repurposing it and putting it into a different context.”

John was also inspired by his great uncle, a chaplain in the Second World War who won the Military Cross, and he said he is very conscious that people did and do die for the flag.

The pieces will be on display as part of the exhibition at the Ulster University Belfast campus as part of the Build Peace Conference this week.

One of the major works, named Reversal, is 2.2m tall took 50 hours to craft and is made of 2,100 brass eyelets, 7,000 cable ties and 54 flags.

John added: “I want people to think a bit beyond what that flag is, what it represents.”