The VRSA Dress, 2013 (Image: Anna Dumitriu)

Fancy being wrapped up in E. coli? Clothed in MRSA? The very idea is enough to make your skin crawl, but for artist Anna Dumitriu it is a source of inspiration. She can turn these terrifying bugs into something strangely beautiful – by combining them with textiles.

“I stitch bacteria and antibiotics into cloth to make patterns and reveal the stories behind microbes,” Dumitriu says. Her biological “inks” range from methicillin- and vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA and VRSA, respectively) to E. coli, other deadly superbugs and tuberculosis.

Sometimes the bugs themselves mark the cloth; in other cases, such as the Staphylococcus varieties, she uses a patented agar jelly to stain them instead. She stitches them into Victorian-era cotton dresses, silk patchwork quilts and crocheted wool bedcovers, and then kills them using a high-pressure laboratory sterilisation technique.


Dumitriu is currently exhibiting a quilt sewn with MRSA and a dress sewn with VRSA at the Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia, until 1 November. The VRSA dress metaphorically maps the evolution of S. aureus from a harmless human microbe into a killer bug by using three separate strains to pattern the dress. “The style of the dress is from 1960, the year that MRSA was first observed,” Dumitriu says. The white dress is sewn with little patchwork squares, each one speckled with either S. aureus, MRSA or VRSA and various antibiotics.

She harvested everyday S. aureus from her nose, and grew it on the dress. Next, she grew two deadly laboratory strains of evolved S. aureus: MRSA and VRSA. “Vancomycin is a last-ditch antibiotic to treat cases of MRSA. But VRSA is resistant to vancomycin as well, which is terrifying.”

Out in the world

The dress captures the growing global problem of antibiotic resistance among disease microbes: in March, the UK’s chief medical officer Sally Davies said it posed a “catastrophic threat”. The World Health Organization says that 3.7 per cent of new cases of tuberculosis and 20 per cent of previously treated cases are drug-resistant, while a high percentage of infections acquired in hospitals are MRSA and VRSA.

Dumitriu embroiders patterns on the dress using thread stained with modern antibiotic drugs and older antibiotic compounds such as yellow turmeric and orange Prontosil, the first commercially available antibiotic, which is derived from a red dye.

The VRSA was resistant to all of these, and only died when sterilised. To avoid catching the bugs, Dumitriu works inside a biosafety level 2 lab, following standard lab safety procedures. Even when using everyday environmental bacteria, she keeps the cultures at low temperatures to minimise the chances of breeding pathogens.

Part of us

Dumitriu’s fascination with bacteria began as a fine arts student when she started painting images of creatures under a microscope. “E. coli absolutely horrified me. On our salad, a version of it could kill you. But we carry around 2 kilos of these bacteria in our gut. It’s a part of us,” she says. Similarly S. aureus live harmlessly in about 30 per cent of people, and can affect our mood and appetite, and even communicate with our nervous system. “The more you look at them, the stranger they become. I wanted to share these stories with others,” she says.

Bed Flora: a collaborative crochet based on the bacteria from the artist’s own bed, which has been added to by exhibition visitors whenever it has been exhibited since 2006 (Image: Anna Dumitriu)

She is also designing a dress using hypersymbionts – human-dwelling bacteria that actively improve us, making us fitter, happier or more intelligent. It will go on display in Taipei, Taiwan, in November. Her next big project, though, is to set up a level 2 laboratory in an art gallery so that visitors can watch and play with live, genetically modified bacteria as the bugs multiply, grow and communicate.

For an upcoming solo show in London, which opens early next year, Dumitriu will focus on tuberculosis. One of the main exhibits will be a collection of tiny felt lungs embroidered with dead TB bacteria and dust. “The show will highlight the superstitions around TB in the 1900s, such as dust being a cause of consumption,” she says. “Like a lot of my work, it is about uncovering the bizarre histories behind medical microbiology and showing how much it has evolved.”