Within the vodou community the flag is a sacred ritual object that identifies the hounfour and honors the spirits with whom it is associated. The sparkle of the sequin or mirror used to capture the attention of the iwa started in the temples. Drapo voudou (sequined sacred flags) are unfurled at the beginning of a ceremony. They are power points that are used for both identification and transformation. When the flag is unfurled it signals the congregants to come to order -the sacred is about to come home to roost. The spirits will soon walk next to (or in) the market woman.[1]

Myrlande constant works in her studio/home, which is located on top of a hill, surrounded by glass-less windows, this is, perhaps, the perfect setting for her flags, which undulate as the wind makes its way into the rooms.

Myrlande constant worked in a wedding dress factory with her mother. After her employers didn’t pay her for her labor, she opposed them and left her job, taking as a severance pay bags with beads and knowledge. She used the sewing and beading skills learned at the factory (the technique used there is called tambour and was developed in france) and started working on her flags. As a result of those situations, in the early 1990’s, myrlande constant became the first woman in haiti to apply the tambour technique in her work, which could be seen as a re-consideration of the making of traditional voudou flags. Moreover, the use of the tambour as a way of building her work, which populated her flags with what at the time were considered as feminine adornments, charged her work with gender.

In her works, constant draws on the back of stretched fabric onto wood while the beading process, what would become the front of the flag, is being formed on the reversed side. Myrlande works through intuition, as she doesn’t see the finished work until the backside has been completed. An artwork that resembles a voudou flag that isn’t seen until it is completed becomes an object worked on from the threshold of the visible. This is a symbol that signifies dualities, syncretism, a belief system, a religion, and a stand-in for those notions, all of which are developed, somehow, almost blindly.