My work explores how systems of power shape identity and belonging. Using visual communication, I interrogate migration, bureaucracy, and surveillance, specifically within New Zealand’s immigration system.
Drawing on my own experience of immigrating from England in 2009, I have reworked official immigration forms, visas, passport applications, and citizenship papers into a series of abstract flags. These flags developed from the very documents that decide who belongs and who does not. By transforming their rigid language and structure into layered, expressive compositions, I aim to reveal how bureaucracy can dehumanise people and reduce lived experience to data and numbers.
Immigration documents rely on language to define identity, yet that same language often erases the complexity of personal stories. My flags speak to that silence, where identity is fragmented, and belonging becomes conditional.
Through this work, I invite viewers to look beyond the cold precision of bureaucratic language and consider the human emotions hidden beneath it. The flags become spaces of questioning and reflection, asking how meaning and empathy might emerge when official language no longer speaks for us.