Maggot Death is the punk print shop preserving media through shirts that shock (NSFW)

Printshop Maggot Death, based in south-east London, “works primarily with found material and objects, collating and collaging disparate elements into one cohesive design,” says founder Jan Margolius. Far from balancing, Jan is steadfast in their irony and situates their work through the culture of bootlegging. Subjects of his work range from political figures, to musicians, to visual artists, and institutions, superimposing “anything deserving of preservation through visual media,” as Jan tells us, onto their t-shirts.

Jan continues, “I like working with shocking subject material; creating designs that can challenge what is ‘acceptable’ to wear on a t-shirt.” These aren’t for the zip-ups and are not to be buttoned-up, but to be worn to be loud about what you identify with. These are worn signifiers, woven in with your own set of beliefs, values, thoughts, and likes. Jan explains how they’re printed: “The artwork is laid out digitally and then screen-printed onto t-shirts, sometimes in combination with appliqué and hand-drawn and hand-coloured elements.”

Jan was drawn to designers from London’s 70s and 80s punk scene, to Artistique et Sentimental and Fifth Column designers who expanded the garment as part of the artwork rather than a frame to it. “They created a new form of visual structure wherein the shape and texture of the t-shirt worked in tandem with the dynamism of the artwork; expanded beyond the physical borders of the sleeves and the hems, coalescing with the body of the person wearing it,” Jan says.