Earley is a designer who really thinks about the sustainability
of her textiles and how the way in which they are created affects the environment.
She is constantly trying out new technology and coming up with new methods of
sustainable printing and clothing construction. She is most well known for her
use of heat photogram to create patterns, which are then digitally edited and
applied to cloth for her garments. The
heat photogram process creates eerie ghostlike silhouettes which created by
placing found objects such as pins, feathers, steel mesh and barbed wire on to
a pre-painted paper. When made into garments, the textiles give the impression
that the objects have been directly transferred onto the clothing, like an
x-ray image.
She was also one of the first designers to use fleece (made
from recycled plastic bottles) in her fashion designs and also developed an
exhaust printing technique that makes use of chemicals caused by classic
printing processes, and re-uses them. More recent collections have made use of
old clothes; re-cutting them to create a new pieces and adding digitally
printed embellishments to them.
Though much of her work seems more concerned with textile
dyeing and fabric construction, her heat photogram work in particular shows her
unique sense of placement of pattern on fabrics for clothing. Her attention to sustainability and re-using
materials is also inspirational, and similar to my use of collage to use up
waste paper.
Exhaust Printing
