Back catalogue* BLOCK PRINT FESTIVAL MERCH (2025)

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Punk was a formative influence on me as a young person. Its do-it-yourself (no gods no masters!) ethos and rejection of authority continue to shape how I think about creativity, participation and systems. Those ideas sit behind BLOCK PRINT FESTIVAL MERCH, a public workshop/artwork I created for FLOW Festival (Oxford Gallery, Toi o Waimakariri) in 2025.

The project grew from an invitation to host a public workshop at the festival. At the time, I was also managing the festival's brand (look, it's a small community ok?). Alongside my art practice, I work in communications and spend a lot of time protecting the conventions of logos, colours and visual identity. For this project, I wanted to do the opposite.

Merchandise is a staple of music and festival culture. For artists and promoters, the proceeds from merch supports their work, though some reject it as an unnecessary commodity in the inherently wasteful capitalist economy that we didn't asked for but got all the same. (I straddle both perspectives: a dislike of buying shit we don't need, and an enduring love for supporting artists and collecting band tees.)

For BLOCK PRINT FESTIVAL MERCH, I deconstructed the festival's branding and invited participants to remix it. Using rubber stamps made from the letters F, L, O, W and a set of simple shapes, participants designed their own tote bags. They could arrange the elements however they wished, but each stamp had a predetermined colour, creating a simple set of constraints.

The workshop revealed how differently people approached the same materials. Some created patterns, some focused on typography, and others embraced playful experimentation. Each bag was unique, yet together they retained a visual relationship to the original brand.

At its heart, the work was about disruption: taking a controlled brand system, breaking it into pieces and handing those pieces over to the public to play with. The resulting bags became both merchandise and evidence of collective authorship.

*Back Catalogue is an archive of projects that predate this site or were not documented when they were produced.

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