Derek Jarman’s Blue Shirt + Poster

Designed and Printed February 2025

It felt right to design a whole suite of materials to go along with the From Below’s screening of Blue. We had been looking forward to this screening for quite a while, one of the main reasons we wanted to build a space like the From Below was to have a vehicle to experience a film like Blue (for those that aren’t familiar, Derek Jarman’s film is a blue screen for its entire runtime, alongside an audio collage of music, memories, and scenes, composed near the end of Jarman’s life as he was losing his eyesight to HIV/AIDS). Part of the inspiration for this set was the idea that Blue exists far beyond the usual experiential capacities of a film—it was also broadcast as a radio play, with a card printed with the specific blue (IKB, or International Klein Blue, named for famously blue-centric artist Yves Klein) issued in the radio guide for people to look at during the broadcast. Every person who came to our screening of Blue was able to take one of these blue cards home.

I also silkscreened the poster for this screening, playing with the materiality of the color by mixing my own approximation of IKB to use in the printing. By combining the card print (as the front pocket) and the poster print (as the back), I turned these two designs into shirts as well.