Artist Sabrina Baker has probably inadvertently solved a major crisis - how do you clearly communicate how you are feeling on a particular day when everyone around you seems to interpret things their own way?
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As part of her exhibition - ironically titled Failure to Communicate - she's designed 26 dresses, representing the 26 maritime signal flags.
Not feeling 100 per cent when you wake up? Whack on the diagonal red and yellow stripes of Y which means "I'm dragging my anchor".
Or if things are all okay, the bright yellow block colour of Q - "My vessel is healthy and I request free practique".
Or quite simply, "No", the blue and white checkerboard pattern of N.
Baker is extremely interested in communication, the way we do it, how we seem to do so much of it, and how, in our increasingly connected world, we can be so easily misunderstood or fail to say what we really mean.
"We're communicating from the time we wake up, to the time we go to sleep," Ms Baker says.
"But is what we're trying to say ever really getting across with the right message?"
The body of work, which also includes two video installations, one of her inflating a small rubber lifeboat with a foot pump as the dresses seamlessly interchange, and the other an aimless row on Lake Burley Griffin, was inspired, somewhat, by her move to Canberra in 2010.
"I moved to Canberra from Sydney to study at the ANU School of Art and I found it a really weird city to try and feel at home in," she says.
"People seem to move here with the idea that they'll be leaving soon and I found it was quite hard to establish connections."
She reflected on that - "how people here often pass like ships in the night" - when putting the exhibition together.
She graduated from the School of Art in 2013, says she has made heaps of friends, and is having a "ripper of a time" here, something she never expected.
As a young Girl Guide Baker was fascinated with learning different ways to communicate, whether that be morse code or via semaphore. (She can also tie a mean reef knot, with rope straps on the dresses.)
"I remember standing on opposite sides of the campsite and trying to get across sneaky messages like, 'Can you bring lollies to my tent?'," she says.
"All these modes of communication we never use, or even the ones we do use, but the message still doesn't get across."
Failure to Communicate is showing at the Huw Davies Gallery, Photoaccess, Manuka Arts Centre, until June 18.
