Blackboard shirt

Blackboard shirt 2, a photo by MadeleineS on Flickr.

Happy new year, shirt-followers! The gap in posting has been partly due to me being on sick leave for a month and then having to catch up on other work. However the shirts are now progressing again and not a moment too soon! The exhibition of ASCUS funded projects is now scheduled for mid January. More details will be posted here when they are confirmed.

As well as exploring mathematics itself, we decided to represent the collaborative process of mathematics. We are preparing two shirts based on the iconic tools of the mathematicians trade, the blackboard and the whiteboard. Mathematicians don’t just use boards for teaching. Ideas are written up to consider privately and with colleagues. The contents of these boards are essentialy ephemeral. Things get ammended, refined and perfected then rubbed out. We have tried to preserve snapshots of this culture.

Images of blackboards were printed on silk and bonded to a black shirt. Relevant text and equations were then hand-embroidered by Julia and I finished the boards with machine stitched grey frames.

For the whiteboard shirt, Julia took a white shirt and a set of fabric dye pens into the School of Mathematics at University of Edinburgh and asked her fellow mathematicians to write examples of current research and open problems directly onto the shirt. After fixing the dyes, I plan to pick out some of the writing in stitch. We’ll have photos of that one shortly.