​The Empire Sweat Shop came about as a result of working with the flags in Altered States, when I learned that the first iteration of the American flag – the stripes & top left corner field – was based on the flag of the East India Trading Company.  I don’t know why this surprised me; we accuse the American government of responding to corporate interests over the interest of citizens all the time, so it’s hardly out of character.  But as I got deeper into my flag research, I became aware of gaping great holes in my basic knowledge of history around the subject of empire.  For a process that defines so much of who we are and how we live, we are remarkably ignorant about colonial history.  We learn more about dinosaurs and Greek gods than the rise & collapse of empire.

My intention is simple – I want to give myself an education.  My initial plan was to sit at my table & sew together flags to follow the expansion of the British Empire, with the help of Wikipedia and a few websites.  But of course, the first victims of the British colonial experiment were Native Americans, and they don’t have flags, so I began to stamp the names of tribes and federations.  I expected to have a giant, unwieldy pile of flags at the end of a week long exhibition – instead, I was only a few hundred names into the 300+ names of tribes that were at best dispossessed, at worst victims of genocide.

Now, of course, I see colonialism everywhere I look, from my cup of coffee to who made my trousers.  The learning curve is steep, the experiment continues.