This video artwork questions what it means to be British today.

Seeing a preposterously large flag flying outside the village hall in Theberton, Suffolk, prompted me to reflect on why that flag had to be so big – and what it says about the inward-looking path Britain seems now to be following.

What was it that made the villagers of Theberton feel the need to mount such a loud display of national pride? Was it Brexit? Was it the Queen’s Jubilee? Was it nationalistic, populist politics? Or was it a feeling of defiance against an imagined invasion of immigrants?

I’ve tried to match this example of inflated patriotism – which I call ‘Big Flag Pride’ – with a painted cardboard sign that’s just as big, so it’s an explicit challenge to today’s curiously nostalgic national fervour.

The huge flag and old-fashioned village hall seem so ‘un-2022’, and somehow reflect the reset that our national consciousness is undergoing, rewinding back to an implausibly rose-tinted memory of the 50s.

The scene in the video also struck me with its eerie emptiness. Here is a flag, lonely without its people. There is no noise of cheering crowds, only the cooing of wood pigeons and the hiss of wind in the beech woods.

Such eeriness evokes an underlying sense of menace that many feel about the villagers’ version of patriotism.