The Flags series began before it had a name.

 

The first flag, A Japanese Flag (2008), was painted at Patricia Cabaleiro’s studio in Singapore in 2008 and brought to Niseko, Hokkaido. The attraction to the flag as a form preceded any knowledge of the Pop art tradition or the work of Jasper Johns. The sun was made of stamped sakura flowers, each one pressed by hand with a stamp the artist created herself. Akageras, woodpeckers, moved quietly across the background, barely darker than the cream and white of the field. It was not a painting of a flag. It was a portrait of Japan.

 

That understanding, that a flag is not a symbol but a living image capable of holding a place, a person, and a history simultaneously, has guided the series ever since. Like the Portraits series, each flag is a portrait: of a place, a person, or both held together in a single image. Each flag is born from the same practice: listening.

 

An American Flag (2010, ongoing) began in Singapore. Its red stripes are collage of German magazines and publications. The artist’s second language, the language of her entire school education, brought together with the American flag as a memory of the Second World War: two countries, one image, the reconciliation held in the stripes. It lives today in the home the artist shares with her American husband. The flag knew before she did. It is still being reworked. Some portraits take years to hear fully.

 

A Flag of Wales (2024) was painted on a Coca-Cola advertising banner that had washed up on a beach in Koh Samui, Thailand. Found, discarded, given new life. For a family whose life has been lived between Asia and Wales for decades, the material was the portrait: Asia embedded in the ground, Wales carried in the image.

 

A Flag of Montana (2024) is a portrait of the land itself: the state that became home.

 

Bill's flag (2026, Bozeman, Montana) replaces the fifty stars of the American flag with botanical drawings of yucca glauca seen from above, the plant Bill Hartman, who was a key contributor to the building of the artwork The Doll House, has loved since childhood in the fields of Roundup, Montana. The red stripes are collage of botanical drawings of cacti he loves. It is a portrait of a man and the land that shaped him, painted in gratitude.

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Sean's flag (2026, in progress, Bozeman, Montana) is a Bohemian flag, the flag Sean Peterson loves and wants to live with. American with Viking descent, drawn to Europe and to the beauty of this particular flag, Sean was the collaborator who 3D printed the furniture that inhabits the artwork The Doll House. His flag is a portrait of what he is drawn toward.

 

The Flags series is ongoing.

 

Flags gives form to and extends the Communication dimension of the ACT practice, Paula Marcondes’ thirty-year artistic research framework. Each flag is also an act of Awareness: the discipline of listening to a place or a person deeply enough to find the image that holds them truly.