The inspiration: I had a high school student for 2 weeks and we were building interactomes for different algae clades: green, red, brown, diatoms to name a few. I also went to a tufting workshop around this time and was inspired by what I was seeing in the microscope.
The inspiration: My first work in cryo-ET. The membrane segmentations from Chlamydomonas tomograms had such fun shapes that I felt I needed to hand paint them onto a shirt. The left side is the chloroplast and the right side is mitochondria.
The inspiration: It was winter in Basel and the city was characteristically dead for the time of the year. In search for a warm escape after an interview at Princeton, I went to Key West for the very first time. Once there, I found a vibrant yarn, a new book, and set myself up on the beach where I spent the next week thinking about the writers that made Key West their creative refuge. The back of this piece says “ARE YOU READING” in letter beads serving as both an homage to the writers who used the island as a space for writing and a commentary on the importance of reading anything from news to literature in the modern day.
The inspiration: I made this collar for my first Choanoflagellates and Friends (ChoanoCon) Meeting. In my scientific world, I was venturing into a new model organism, reading extensively on this unicellular species with a single flagella and dramatic actin-based collar. After months of looking at their elegant collar, I wanted to make a collar of my own to wear for the meeting.
The inspiration: As the weather in Switzerland shifted to cold and the days got shorter I began thinking of my time in Austin, TX where the winter days were still filled with warmth. I started painting these little flowers that were reminiscent of Texas on several of my clothing projects. So when someone asked me for a custom Christmas gift, this hand-painted Wrangler snap shirt was the next logical step.
The inspiration: This vest is made from the fabric of a curtain from my grandparent’s lake house where I would spend the summers with my cousins. The vest is reversible, with the other side being a more muted “mature” version, representing the occasional reversible nature between child- and adulthood.
The inspiration: My beautiful best friend that I lost to ovarian cancer in 2023. Katie was one of my biggest supporters of my creative projects. I started working on a clothing line in 2022 with her encouragement. One of my earliest themes was clothing made from scientific paintings that I made while writing my PhD thesis. I made this shirt for Katie and she sported it proudly on the streets of NYC like the icon she was. The front displays microtubule doublets complete with microtubule inner proteins (MIPs) and the shoulder is a soup of axonemal proteins.
The inspiration: One of my first major ciliary publications. It was a moment that should have felt victorious but was instead shrouded by feeling of inadequacy due to several similar publications around the same time and lack of communication in the field. Painting the complex in the colors I used for the proteins in my paper and making a shirt of the pattern was a way for me to carve my own space and create a feeling of belonging in the field.
The inspiration: Confusion- I made this shortly after beginning my postdoc and at the time I felt myself torn between cultures having moved from my home country; between scientific interests feeling somewhat burned by the cilia field, I took a brief detour in chloroplasts; between methodology, I was leaving behind my proteomics and single-particle analysis home and in the new space on tomography. I hate this piece and I think it is because of the confusion it projects.
The inspiration: During the summers I like to sit by the Rhein and either write in my notebook or crochet. When I first moved to Basel I found a local shop that sold yarn offcuts for very cheap. Since then, I have been exploring with colors and summerish freehand designs all while giving the materials a second life. More to come!
The inspiration: I bought this beautiful mohair yarn in Helsinki, a place that felt like a complicated fairytale to me. After returning, I crocheted this vest reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel- telling a story of abandonment and falling into the hands of evil before escaping. The color transition of the vest represents the woods Hansel and Gretel were trapped in to the fire that ultimately ends the witch.
The inspiration: My first crochet project after moving to Basel. This was not an original design, I wanted to make a reversible vest and found this very cool pattern from the very talented Day Lan Hanh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfsy-9F9ifU.
The inspiration: The few months before my PhD defense I did a brief conference tour to share the fruit of my labor. This included my first ever cilia conference (FASEB Cilia Meeting), the 3DEM GRC, and the Protein Society Annual Meeting. I designed a poster that represented the culmination of my PhD and would be accessible across audiences… printing it on fabric for future plans ;). After returning from my tour, I spent the final month of my PhD writing up my findings, ensuring my presentation was filled with memes and inside jokes, and making the perfect pair of defense pants.