Imagined Territories: The Art House, Wakefield

Launching 20 June 2026

I'm delighted to be launching Imagined Territories at The Art House, Wakefield, on 20 June as part of Refugee Week Celebration Day 2026.

Over the past year I have been developing the project as an exploration of identity, belonging, community and the symbols we choose to gather around. Originally realised as a city-wide public poster campaign across Sheffield and Barnsley, Imagined Territories asked a simple question: what might a flag look like if it belonged to everyone?

Working closely with Damon Jackson-Waldock, Ellie, Dave, Laura and the wider team at The Art House, I have been able to take the project into an exciting new phase. For the first time, the artwork has been realised as a civic public sculpture: a physical flag flying above the city from the roof of The Art House.

Flags are powerful objects. They can unite, divide, celebrate, exclude, welcome and provoke. Imagined Territories borrows the visual language and authority of a national flag while deliberately representing no single nation, organisation or ideology. Instead, it offers an open symbol — a flag shaped by the belief that community itself can be a superpower.

The launch takes place during Refugee Week and alongside exhibitions by Kadir Karababa and Fotohane. This year's theme, Community as a Superpower, feels deeply connected to the thinking behind the project. At its heart, Imagined Territories is about people, shared experiences and the possibility of creating symbols that bring us together rather than pull us apart. In a time when conversations around borders, migration and identity remain highly charged, the project offers a simple proposition: that belonging can be expansive, generous and shared. Everyone is welcome.

Alongside the rooftop flag sculpture, the project extends into the public realm through a large-scale billboard installation outside The Art House, continuing the visual language of the original poster campaign and bringing the work directly into everyday civic space.

The exhibition also includes a limited-edition giclée print produced in collaboration with Bicep Press. Continuing the project's commitment to public culture and collective action, 10% of all profits from the edition will be donated to ArtCry, supporting politically engaged artworks and creative interventions in public space.

Coming soon is a wearable enamel pin badge further extends the project, allowing the symbol to move from billboard to print, from civic sculpture to personal object. Small in scale but significant in intent, it offers another way for people to carry, share and activate the work in their everyday lives.

A further development of the project is a special edition of ten hand-crafted canvas flags. Produced in The Art House Print Studio through a ten-layer screen-printing process, each flag has been individually finished with metal eyelets and hand-stitched by Hamid at Wakefield Tailoring. Part artwork, part banner and part textile object, these pieces have been conceived as editioned civic artefacts — physical manifestations of the project's central ideas around belonging, participation and collective identity.

At the heart of Imagined Territories is a belief that artworks become richer when they are activated by people. Reflecting my wider practice, the project creates opportunities for conversation, participation and shared experience, allowing meaning to emerge through the connections, encounters and stories that gather around it.

What began as an image has gradually evolved into something that can be flown, carried, collected and activated by people. From billboard to print, badge to banner, and now civic sculpture, Imagined Territories continues to ask how art might create space for conversation, connection and a more generous vision of who we are together.

Imagined Territories
The Art House, Wakefield
20 June 2026
10am–4pm
Free admission
Everyone welcome.

About Refugee Week
Refugee Week is an annual festival that takes place each June around World Refugee Day on 20 June. It is a time to celebrate the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugee and asylum-seeking communities, while raising awareness of why people seek sanctuary. The theme for Refugee Week 2026 is Community as a Superpower, celebrating the everyday acts of connection, welcome and solidarity that help people feel they belong.

Joy and play are central to how the work is made. Play operates as a methodology rather than an outcome, a way of testing, breaking, reconfiguring and discovering. Through repetition and return, a graphic language slowly evolves over time, becoming more refined without losing its looseness.

Each painting is unique, but together they speak as a group, connected by rhythm, colour and an underlying structure that holds the compositions in balance.

Further information:
The Art House, Wakefield