Silence Shirts

This work was made in order to explore the potential for meditation practice and silent portrait painting to create the conditions for collaborative working relationships.

Becky Earley uses the remanufacturing of the polyester shirt to explore ideas about sustainable textile design strategy, education and fashion innovation. The work focuses on building bridges between science, industry and academic researchers towards new models for the circular fashion textile industry. As this body of work has progressed, the value of co-creating the garments has become increasing clear. In exploring new research questions the shirts previously created through workshop scenarios have provided very different kinds of insights when compared to shirts created by the author in a solo or partner context.

Building on this body of practice research work, Becky wanted to use unscheduled time in a project workshop to co-create a shirt print design to understand whether spending time making something together could help bridge the divide between design and science partners and contribute to the formation of lasting working relationships.