Contemporary Community Textile Artist Derbyshire UK
Collaboration Kindness Carbon Sensitivity
Divided Selves | Community Flag Project
Four Community Collectives Responding To Art, Identity & Belonging
Period
2023
My Role
Community Project Development, Artist Liaison and Facilitation
Project Type
Community Exhibition Project
Location
Coventry
Project Overview
Divided Selves grew from my community engagement work at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum and from a question that kept returning throughout that period: how do people who do not already feel comfortable in galleries begin to see these spaces, and the art inside them, as something they can take part in rather than something that belongs to somebody else? That question shaped a community textile flag project in Coventry, linked to Larry Achiampong's Pan African Flag and the Herbert's 2023 Divided Selves exhibition.
Responding To Larry Achiampong
Larry Achiampong’s Pan African Flag became the starting point for a community flag project linked to the Herbert’s 2023 Divided Selves exhibition. I spent time understanding the work and its themes of identity, belonging, memory and representation, and helped translate that thinking into a form that community groups could respond to through their own visual language.
I also put together the project information leaflet so people could understand where the community flags sat in relation to Achiampong’s work and the wider exhibition. That explanatory layer mattered to me. I had seen how easily galleries can feel full of hidden rules, and I wanted participants to have enough context to enter the conversation without being told what their response should look like.
Working With Community Collectives
The wider project brought together four community collectives: Coventry Men’s Shed, Foleshill Creates, Inini and In Stitches from Escape Arts in Nuneaton. My own direct work was with Foleshill Creates and In Stitches, while the complete project brought the four groups together through the Herbert.
The work was not about asking everybody to reproduce a single design. Each collective was encouraged to think about what a flag could carry for them: identity, place, memory, belonging, shared experience and the things a group might want to make visible. That meant conversation and interpretation were as important as sewing. The resulting textiles carried different visual languages because the groups themselves were different.
Seeing the process develop also deepened my understanding of co-production. The most useful moments were often the ones where a participant’s idea altered the direction rather than simply completing something I had already decided. The University of Birmingham’s writing on co-production at the Herbert gives useful wider context for this way of working.
Flags, Identity & Belonging
The finished community flags were shown as part of Divided Selves at the Herbert in 2023, placing community made textile responses inside the gallery rather than treating participation as something separate from the exhibition. The Herbert’s own Divided Selves exhibition material records the wider context in which the project took place.
This project also sits in a longer thread through my practice. The experience of working with flags, collective identity and community voice developed ideas I had already explored through The Coventry Banner, while pushing me further into questions of cultural democracy: who feels entitled to enter a gallery, whose visual language is valued there, and what changes when communities are invited to respond as makers rather than simply as audiences.
The photographs and project leaflet now held with this page are important evidence of that process. They show not only finished flags but the conversations, making, interpretation and practical work that sat behind them. For me, that is where the project really lives.
