Flag of Ireland as Rearranged by the Mail, 2001
The Temple Bar Gallery
Dublin, Ireland
July 2001
During preparations for an exhibition at the Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin I noticed that some mailed correspondence took considerably longer to arrive than others. As a way of exercising the distance between Ottawa and Dublin, I designed an artwork. Everyday for 192 days I mailed a postcard-sized piece of the flag of Ireland from my studio to the gallery. If the cards had arrived in the same sequence in which they were mailed, the flag would have been reconstructed faithfully. That however was not the case and the result is an abstraction as created by the rhythms of the mail.
The artwork is in the collection of the Anglo-Irish Bank, Chicago.
The flag ready to be mailed in the studio. The cards were mailed from the left to right and top to bottom beginning in April 2000.
The flag as reassembled in Dublin in order of arrival, July 2001
Reverse of cards with stamps and addresses before mailing began.