Collective Canvas

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Collective Canvas

New Zealand based footwear brand. We make simple sneakers from natural and sustainable materials.

24/09/2026

INSPIRATION // In 1951, Nek Chand took a job as a road inspector in Chandigarh, the new city being built in northern India after Partition. Dozens of villages were cleared to make way for it, leaving behind rubble, broken pottery and discarded building materials.
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Around 1957, Chand began collecting this waste and bringing it to a patch of protected forest land near Sukhna Lake. Working alone, mostly at night, he used it to build sculptures, walls and pathways. The land was government-owned and the project was entirely unofficial, so he kept it hidden for almost two decades.
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When authorities discovered the garden in 1975, it had grown to cover several acres. Demolition was considered, but public support was strong enough to save it. The garden opened to visitors in 1976, and Chand was given a salary and a team of workers to continue.
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Today it spans around 40 acres and holds thousands of figures made from broken tiles, glass bangles, bottles, bicycle frames, electrical fittings and ceramic sinks. Nothing was bought new.
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The Rock Garden is a reminder that creativity isn’t limited by resources. Chand saw value in materials others had written off, and gave them a second life that has outlasted the man himself.
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It’s a principle we come back to often: work with what the earth provides, waste as little as possible, and make things that are built to last.

25/08/2026

INSPIRATION // Sun Tunnels is a land art installation in the Great Basin Desert, Utah. Four concrete cylinders, each about eighteen feet long and nine feet across, arranged in an open X formation across forty acres of flat desert.
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The tunnels are aligned with the sunrise and sunset on the summer and winter solstices. Holes drilled through the walls correspond to the constellations Draco, Perseus, Columba and Capricorn. Sunlight passes through and projects star patterns onto the interior walls during the day.
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The work is a framing device. The desert out there is so featureless and expansive that it overwhelms perception. The tunnels give scale and focus to the landscape, turning sky, light and horizon into something you can actually take in. Nothing is added to the environment except a way of looking at it.
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Nancy Holt was an American artist working from the late 1960s until her death in 2014. She was part of the land art movement alongside Robert Smithson, who she was married to. Most of her work dealt with perception and orientation in landscape, using simple industrial forms like concrete, steel and stone to direct attention toward natural phenomena rather than away from it.

16/07/2026

Our best selling style in two new flavours (well, one a fan-favourite taken from our Straat H**p range). Introducing Veld H**p in Olive & Mushroom 🫒🍄‍🟫

10/06/2026

The best kind of company. Coffee dates in our h**p styles Straat and Looper.

21/05/2026

For sunny Saturdays and second dates.

30/04/2026

INSPIRATION // In 2004, the Chinese architect Wang Shu won a competition to design a new museum in Ningbo. The site sat in a district where around thirty villages had recently been razed to make way for development — what Wang would later call a “no memory area.” Rather than start from a clean slate, he collected the rubble.
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The Ningbo History Museum opened in 2008. Its walls hold more than twenty kinds of brick, stone and tile salvaged from those villages, some dating to the Ming Dynasty, some over a thousand years old. They are laid using a regional technique called wapan — a method developed by farmers to rebuild after typhoons, packing mismatched fragments together with thin courses of lime mortar. The system is forgiving by design. It accepts whatever is to hand.
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By the time the project began, the technique had nearly been forgotten. Wang taught the local builders from old photographs, then gave them latitude to arrange the pieces themselves. The walls are, in effect, co-authored. No two stretches of facade repeat.
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It is, by any measure, one of the most material-efficient large buildings of the last twenty years - a thirty-thousand square metre museum clad in what was already there. But Wang rarely frames the project in those terms. For him, reuse is not a virtue to be claimed; it is simply the more honest way to build in a country tearing itself down at speed. The sustainability of the building is a consequence of taking its place seriously, not a feature added on top.
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Wang has said he didn’t want to put tradition into a museum, because once tradition is housed in a museum, it is already dead. He wanted the building itself to keep it alive — its history, its craft, and the materials that carried both.

16/04/2026

Simplicity, but make it colourful… Our Looper H**p is the lightest sneaker we’ve ever made 🪶

10/03/2026

Two for the price of one… laces that is. All of our Looper styles come with two pairs of laces - one tonal, one contrast - to help you make them your own 🪢

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http://www.collectivecanvas.com/

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