Liz Cooke Flags

Based in deepest St Lawrence on the Isle of Wight, artist Liz Cooke, with her partner Joe Truman, has been making flags and installing them at festivals since 2008, transforming landscapes with her colourful designs. Passionate about environmental issues, Liz's flags are made in her off-grid workshop, powered by a solar panel which runs the sewing machine.

Liz trained as a photographer and worked as a photographer/illustrator in London throughout the 1990s. After 6 months travelling in India, Liz moved to the Isle of Wight, to focus on her meditation practice, where she met surfer and painter Joe.

Liz began making flags in 2008 and quickly became fascinated at the ability of flags to transform a space into something celebratory and up-lifting. As part of her creative practice Liz has designed and made hundreds of beautiful, arena size, festival flags, while Joe has designed and refined a rig that enables them to fly flags in all weather conditions. Together with their crew they have created spectacular large-scale flag installations making events come alive with the magic of colour and movement.

Flag Hire
Liz and Joe work closely with production teams to create beautiful flag installations for festivals and events, and have 15 years of experience in flying flags in all weather conditions.

They undertake site visits, consult site maps, and plan with clients to create flag installations that have maximum effect in terms of their layout.

The flags are large scale and are perfect for big festivals and events. They mark out arenas and areas that can be seen over large distances, helping audiences to navigate a big site, and delineate areas.

Each flag flies from a scaffold pole (5m or 6m high) attached to groundworks. It is a heavy duty, robust rig that has been vigorously tested at scale for over a decade.

The flags are availavble in hundreds of original designs and colour-ways.

Choose from:

Arena festival flags - Arena flags use an extension pole that sits on top of the scaffold pole, so they stand at up to 9m high. They come with a bespoke rotational arm, allowing the designs to be seen even when there is no wind.
Banners - Our huge banners and their long tails fly without an arm and work well in windy conditions and exposed landscapes. Their movement is dreamy and mesmerising.

Environmental
The flags are designed and made by Liz in her off-grid, solar-powered workshop on the Isle of Wight, in an intentionally meditative, small scale model of working.

Moving towards a zero-waste policy, Liz repairs flag sets and upcycles them into other designs when they are past their best, which additionally creates new colour-ways and tones in the designs. The cut-outs and scraps from each new flag set are used as details in other designs, made into fringe bunting, or used in various craft projects. No fabric is wasted or binned.

During 2019 Liz began exploring the use of working with recycled materials, turning a paragliding wing into a canopy for Carnevale at Rhythmtree Festival, and using end of roll spinnaker fabric to make a set of flags for Greenpeace for their “Protect Our Oceans” campaign.

Liz also collects sails, spinnakers and paragliders from local friends with a view to creating new art and banner work from used materials

Clients
Liz and Joe have been privileged to work with some amazing clients over the last decade, designing and rigging flag installations for small, medium and large festivals and events, transforming landscapes with vibrant colour and movement.

Our clients have included: