Merchant reimagines the receipt, an everyday object often dismissed as trivial and disposable, to explore its overlooked role as a medium that influences consumer behavior and social perception. By transforming receipts into a meticulously designed hardcover book, this project challenges their traditional role and examines how altering a medium’s form reshapes its meaning and impact.

Receipts are typically seen as simple records of transactions, but their ephemeral design subtly reinforces consumption habits and promotes their role as disposable tools of efficiency. However, their cumulative presence creates invisible data trails, shaping behaviors within consumer systems. This project critiques that hidden influence by elevating the receipt into a reflective and permanent format.

The book, titled Merchant, juxtaposes the fragility of receipts with the durability of a bound volume. Each page retains the receipt’s original thermal paper material but reconfigures it into a novel-like format with structured margins, chapters, and flowing text. The dark cloth cover adds weight and significance, contrasting sharply with the transient nature of the receipts inside. This transformation invites viewers to reconsider the value and meaning of this mundane object, highlighting the tension between impermanence and permanence, utility and reflection.

By recontextualising receipts into a carefully crafted book, Merchant transforms the transient into the enduring, forcing a re-engagement with the medium itself. This project critiques the invisible forces embedded in everyday life, prompting reflection on how even the most mundane objects mediate relationships between individuals and broader systems of consumption and value.