Imagined Territories: The Art House, Wakefield
A Flag for Everyone and for No One

Imagined Territories:
The Art House, Wakefield

A Flag for Everyone, and for No One.

Imagined Territories  is an evolving public artwork originally realised as a city-wide public poster campaign across Sheffield and Barnsley, the project asked a simple question: What might a flag look like if it belonged to everyone and to no one?

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.

Working closely with Damon Jackson-Waldock, Ellie, Dave, Laura, Sophie and the wider team at The Art House, together, we have taken 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 gallery.

Imagined Territories proudly supports the national Gallery of Sanctuary scheme, championing UK arts institutions that actively welcome, protect and empower refugees and asylum seekers through creative practice. 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.

Further Than a Flag
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.

Imagined Territories reflects my wider practice, by building on the belief that artworks become richer when they are activated by people and creating 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.