Blink Friction is an archive-based and material-led art practice by Sarnia de la Maré, developed over decades of interdisciplinary work in visual art, film, music, and publishing.
Rooted in stencil culture and salvage processes, the practice has evolved into a distinctive symbolic language centred on personal sigils, feminine archetypes, and reclaimed histories.
Through layered interventions, each work operates as a site of transformation — where found materials are reactivated as contemporary objects of meaning and value.
Blink Friction Arts — Manifesto
Blink Friction Arts was founded by Sarnia de la Maré in 2025 as an independent studio movement rooted in reuse, experimentation, and cultural salvage.
The project emerged from working with limited resources in a period of rising living costs and shrinking access to creative materials. Many Blink Friction works are created using reclaimed, surplus, failed, or discarded stock — vinyl records, test prints, manuscripts, packaging, and rescued paper — transformed through layering, mark-making, and symbolic systems into unique artefacts.
Blink Friction rejects the idea that artistic value comes from expensive materials, elite spaces, or opaque pricing structures.
Value comes from attention, labour, risk, and meaning.
The studio operates through multiple channels:
• Open auctions and low-cost releases, designed to keep original art in circulation and accessible
• Signature and archive-level works, developed over time
• A print and merchandise line produced in collaboration with Tale Teller Club Press, making selected works available as affordable editions
• Ongoing experimental and research-led practice
The auction model is central to the project’s ethics.
It avoids the artificial scarcity, gatekeeping, and inflated language of high-end art marketing. Instead, it allows collectors, students, and first-time buyers to engage directly with the work on equal terms.
Some pieces are released for 99p.
Others develop into long-form, high-value works.
Both are essential.
Blink Friction operates as a living system rather than a fixed brand. Each piece forms part of a wider archive of practice, process, and cultural response. The studio remains intentionally open, informal, and human — resisting pretension in favour of clarity and honesty.
Alongside original works, Blink Friction supports ethical resale and reuse of creative materials and artworks, extending the life of objects and images within a sustainable creative economy.
In the long term, the project aims to collaborate with and support other artists working under similar conditions, building a small-scale cooperative network rooted in independence, skill, and shared resources.
Blink Friction Arts is not mass production.
It is not luxury branding.
It is cultural salvage —
transforming overlooked materials into meaningful objects, and keeping art in public circulation.
The designs below are taken from original Blink Friction artworks adapted for printing.
For original artworks by Blink Friction, check out our new eBay store.
