A Little More Like Water is a collection of knitwear and print apparel developed as a way to encourage and celebrate communal grieving. It is inspired by five specific stories of parental loss and uses the ocean as a metaphor for the way grief lingers in our bodies long after the initial experience of loss. The knits were developed on domestic and industrial knitting machines, and fabrics are both digitally printed and hand painted.
For more, visit 2020risdgrad.show
Inspiration
The collection is rooted in a series of seven striped color studies that evoke various times of day at the beach, from sunrise to sunset. The stripes were derived from my personal collection of obsessive beach photos.
Process
I used interviews conducted with friends and family members who have experienced the death of a parent to draw connections between grief and the ocean, and to create a unified collection that speaks to each persons individual experience while simultaneously creating a feeling of community. I made an ensemble for each person interviewed, which corresponds to each of the middle five painted landscape stripes.
The collection
“Claire”
“Terra”
“Sheila”
“Jackie”
“Annie”
