A few words I never thought I’d say: Why, yes I’d love to wear this bacteria-covered scarf. And yet, here I am coveting a piece of silk dyed with what could be considered the excretion of streptomyces, a non-pathogenic strain of bacteria commonly found in the roots of plants.
The fabric is the work of designer Natsai Audrey Chieza, who is working with John Ward, a professor of synthetic biology at University College in London, to figure out how we might be able to use natural processes (like pigment-producing bacteria) to replace traditional dyeing techniques that are damaging to the environment. More broadly, though, Chieza is investigating what it might look like for designers to work in this burgeoning bio-centric medium.
Chieza herself has no background in science, though if you ask her, a certain level of naiveté is helpful when approaching a new project like The Fold. “It just means you don’t know what the boundaries are,” she says. “If you don’t know if the answer is yes or no about your inquiry, nothing hold you back from trying.” The designer became interested in biology during her time at Central Saint Martins where she was getting her masters in material futures. We’ve long known that bacteria produces pigments as part of its metabolic process, but Chieza wanted to see how this fact might be applied in a traditional craft like textile production.
She began experimenting with bacteria, figuring out the intricacies of making a perfect culture. It didn’t take long before she realized that like dye, bacteria is capable of producing rich, jewel-toned hues. To make the scarves Chieza folds or scrunches a piece of silk into a 150mm petri dish. The silk is inoculated with a small amount of live streptomyces, and as it incubates over the next few days, the scarf takes on purples, blues, pinks and reds. The yellow you see in one of the scarves is the result of a rogue bit of fungus mixing with the streptomyces.
You can control the outcome, but only to a certain extent. Things like pH levels, length of incubation, temperature and the size of the petri dish all impact the aesthetic outcome, though Chieza is still in the process of researching how exactly variables impact the pigmentation. “At this point it’s not reliable method if what you want is uniformity,” she says, adding that if uniformity is what you’re striving for it might make sense to program the bacteria to produce a certain pigment. Likewise, in the future one could genetically engineer a silkworm to produce specific pigments. “That’s fine but that would be quite boring for me,” she says. Instead, Chieza is hoping to experiment with co-culturing bacteria to produce different pigments. “It’s quite close to the notion that you mix red and blue to get purple,” she says.
It’s a fundamentally different approach to design, one where you forfeit control to a living system that has its own way of doing things. On a small scale, this can produce beautifully unexpected outcomes, like you see with these scarves. Scaling the process up is a whole other battle though, so don’t expect to find these in Bloomingdales anytime soon.