Kyra Mancktelow: No Blak in the Union Jack. : N.Smith Gallery

Kyra Mancktelow’s series No Blak in the Union Jack takes its title from British Academic Paul Gilroy’s book ‘There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation’.

Written in 1987, Gilroy’s book is a powerful indictment of then current attitudes to race in Great Britain. The author accused British intellectuals and politicians on both sides of the political divide of refusing to take race seriously.

Flags have different interpretations to many different people – but a Blak Union Jack speaks to the colonialism and persecution of the Indigenous people in Australia. Kyra’s unique ink print of the Union Jack continues this racial discourse visually. By recreating the Union Jack out of tarleton, a stiff fabric typically used to remove ink from an etching plate plays as metaphor for colonial assimilation. By rubbing the ink back into the fabric, Kyra puts blakness into the flag. The result is a transfer of ink and conceptual ideas, creating an image that stages stark encounters between emblems of colonialism and Indigenous cultural resistance.