Angus Watt – The Flags

Angus Watt, spe­cial­ist in mak­ing inspi­ra­tional flags, to cre­ate a unique art form.

Pio­neer­ing the sophis­ti­cated use of colour, with mon­u­men­tal scale, since 1993.

These fes­ti­val flags are often cre­ated in eco art stu­dios, pow­ered only by solar and wind energy.

Pole Posi­tion

Angus Watt’s multi-hued ban­ners wave the flag at cul­tural fes­ti­vals all over the world. On the eve of Adelaide’s WOMAD event, Jane Corn­well sees which way the wind blows.

BACK in 1993,

on a deserted beach in Cyprus, a set of flags undu­lated in the wind. Tall, ele­gant, large-scale flags, colours faded by the sun, their fab­ric whipped and bat­tered by the ele­ments. Unob­served except by gulls and the occa­sional beach­comber, they shim­mered from long bam­boo poles. Anony­mous. Unex­plained. Qui­etly artistic.

“I loved the idea of some­body just walk­ing onto that beach and see­ing these vast flags,” says their cre­ator, Angus Watt. “The fact that no-one else was around – no cam­era crews, noth­ing – gave it added power. It was the antithe­sis of all the media hype that goes with being a mod­ern artist. The sort of stuff we are doing now.”

These sub­tle but spec­tac­u­lar ban­ners have marked out many a tem­po­rary magic repub­lic since their debut on a Cyprus shoreline.

The 44-year-old Briton has always val­ued his anonymity, always tried to let his “flagscapes” speak for them­selves. Until recently, they have. Arranged in the hun­dreds – and with no two flags ever the same – these sub­tle but spec­tac­u­lar ban­ners have marked out many a tem­po­rary mag­i­cal repub­lic since their debut on that Cyprus shore­line. They’ve become syn­ony­mous with WOMAD fes­ti­vals across the world; no men­tion of this lauded cel­e­bra­tion of world music is com­plete with­out ref­er­ence to the WOMAD flags stand­ing sentinel.

They’ve graced the Glas­ton­bury Fes­ti­val, the Welling­ton Arts Fes­ti­val, Sri Lanka’s Fes­ti­val of Drum­ming. There have been work­shops with the Pit­jan­t­jat­jara peo­ple of South Aus­tralia and instal­la­tions to cel­e­brate a solar eclipse over Eng­land. With pop­u­lar­ity, how­ever, has come pla­gia­rism: a surge in copy­cat flagscapes at unre­lated arts events has forced the reluc­tant Watt out from his stu­dio in South­ern Spain to, well, wave the flag for his creations.

“Part of the flags’ power is that they’re unadul­ter­ated by the com­mer­cial world,” says Watt, a visual arts/sculpture grad­u­ate. “For years I worked in a lit­tle artis­tic bub­ble, but the explo­sion in fes­ti­vals and all this imi­ta­tion – which every­one said was bound to hap­pen – means I’m hav­ing to defend myself.”

“The pos­i­tive side,” he says, “is that what comes to me very nat­u­rally hasn’t really worked when other peo­ple have tried it. I’d always thought it was just a scale thing – make them big enough, give them enough light and they’ll be inter­est­ing. But hav­ing seen other people’s flags flap­ping around I know that just isn’t the case.”

Just why his flags are so dis­tinc­tive he’s hard-pressed to say. “When they’re right, they’re right,” he shrugs. Grow­ing up in an artis­tic fam­ily (Watt’s mother Ann Ver­ney is a water­colourist, his late father a cel­e­brated painter, and elder sis­ter Shona an artist and some­time col­lab­o­ra­tor) means he works freely, instinctively.

“Dad was a bril­liant colourist. He devel­oped colour the­o­ries based on French impres­sion­ism; he’d play with sub­tleties from one colour to another.” The teenage Watt helped his father mix the paints on the palettes; he got the Renaissance-style edu­ca­tion that comes from watch­ing a mas­ter at work. “Dad’s low-key approach very much informs what I do now. Because, despite being so large and un-intimate, the flags speak to you. They don’t shout.”

Watt’s flags cross bound­aries, sug­gest jour­neys. None has words or obvi­ous graph­ics; their very aes­thetic qual­ity sub­verts the polit­i­cal, sym­bolic and nation­al­is­tic intent of con­ven­tional flags.

Watt was in his final year at art col­lege in 1989 when his father died. The grief made him rethink his career and his art; three years later, truck­ing across South Africa on a Win­ston Churchill travel bur­sary, he had what he calls “dream­time visions of ban­ners and flags.” Back in Lon­don, he was fur­ther inspired by an exhi­bi­tion of cer­e­mo­nial Asafo flags from Ghana. In Cyprus the fol­low­ing year he made those flags with fab­ric he’d cut with a penknife.

Pho­tos of this first flagscape impressed WOMAD, whose mul­ti­cul­tural music pol­icy had duly impressed Watt. “It was very dif­fer­ent doing the flags in a fes­ti­val envi­ron­ment, where 30,000 peo­ple are shriek­ing and hav­ing a good time. But the flags always come alive once the music starts. Like that [Wal­ter Pater] quote, ‘All art aspires to the con­di­tion of music’, the flags aren’t telling you what to feel. Like music, they’re pow­er­ful but neutral.”

And like music, Watt’s flags cross bound­aries, sug­gest jour­neys. None has words or obvi­ous graph­ics; adorned with geo­met­ric shapes, dis­creet designs or palette-friendly blocks of colour, their very aes­thetic qual­ity sub­verts the polit­i­cal, sym­bolic and nation­al­is­tic intent of con­ven­tional flags. With the appear­ance of silk but the real­ity of poly­ester lin­ing fab­ric made in Japan, they hang from poles fit­ted with a bam­boo arm. Entranc­ing. Mys­ti­fy­ing. Intriguing.

“The flags are very labour-intensive,” says Watt, who uses indus­trial machin­ists and seam­stresses and hires a crew of up to 15 on-site. “I’m con­stantly work­ing within para­me­ters. The design might be deter­mined by the width the fab­ric comes in. Restric­tions are imposed by fes­ti­vals: the irri­ga­tion pipes under Botanic Park mean that WOM­ADe­laide, as lovely as it is, only gives me a small strip of land to do my work on. But they add to the ambi­ence just the same.”

Watt cre­ates his flags in the “big old yurt” adjoin­ing his house in rural Andalu­cia. “I wanted to set myself up some­where other than Britain. I’d trav­elled around Spain a lot when I was younger; like Cyprus it offered so much artis­tic free­dom. My yurt is a lovely space, too. It’s like an upturned umbrella, with ropes all around it that I can hang fab­ric over.”

Although not shy of flag­ging big events – for last April’s first-ever WOMAD Fes­ti­val in Abu Dhabi, Watt “got a dig­ger and put them in the sea” – he always looks for­ward to par­tic­i­pat­ing in his local vil­lage fiesta, where he employs del­i­cately posi­tioned bunting and the occa­sional stream­ing flag. “It’s my favourite event of the year,” he says. “It’s always weird head­ing off to the Glas­ton­bury Fes­ti­val in June and putting up 700 of them.”

What, then, is his all-time favourite flagscape? “One we did for Welling­ton Arts Fes­ti­val [2002], in the sec­ond windi­est city in the world. We put the flags along the bay and they pulsed with this incred­i­ble kinetic energy before they got com­pletely shred­ded. Sit­ting watch­ing the bam­boo bend and the flags come apart was exhil­a­rat­ing.” Watt flashes a grin. “I really felt the pas­sion of what it means to be an artist – an artist with a small ‘a’.”