A few years before my mom died, my best friend Elizabeth came home from college and taught me how to knit. The utter obsession with textile-based making didn’t kick in right away, but later, after my mother died, I latched onto fabric like burdock to a sheepdog’s fur. Knitting has wound its way into every area of my life, including my graphic design work. 

Both grief and graphic design projects are never really finished. There’s always more one can figure out, change, improve, and contemplate, and it never feels done, but at some point one just has to let go. Eventually it’s time to send the files off to the printer; eventually it’s time to open one’s heart back up to a world that has caused great pain. But in both cases, we may continue exploring, iterating, and dealing with the work for the rest of our lives. Despite this truth, there is a commonly held belief that both design projects and grief processes do need to be finished and perfected at some point. I challenge that belief. 

My thesis, Unfinished: Communicating Grief and Healing Through Handmade Textiles, documents my research into the historical and contemporary work that links grief, healing, textiles, and design, and thereby emphasizes the value of sharing space for quiet creation and community among those who have experienced grief similar to my own, allowing room for the unfinished and imperfect, and expanding the materials and techniques we think of as graphic design. It includes personal writing (journal entries, letters to my mother, and other materials) to lay bare my own experience of coming to terms with grief and the ways that textile making has enriched and enabled that experience. The writing is raw, and it interjects itself throughout the document in the same way that moments of raw grief interject themselves into the flow of the everyday.

Angela Paladino (she/her) is a fiber artist, musician, graphic designer, and editor. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at Studio Place Arts, Vermont College of Fine Arts, the Fletcher Free Library, and elsewhere. Angela and her two dogs live in various locations around the country in their camper van, Vincent Van Go. When in Vermont, Angela is one quarter of the indie rock band Anachronist. No matter where she is, she spends a lot of her time making textile-based art and design (knitting, crocheting, weaving, sewing, embroidering…), doing freelance graphic design, riding her bicycle, reading books, and hiking with her dogs.

What Might Be
by Angela Paladino

Money.
Time.
Space.
The things that make us
crazy and
lonely and
confused,
the things that flow back and forth,
or just away through
our stretched fingers.
Nerves pulled tight, resources spread thin,
catastrophe
predicted at every turn.
But here’s the twist—
not a one of us knows shit.
I can whisper to you what I’m afraid of,
and you can cry out what makes you cry,
and we can plan our plans. But
no one has a clue, and it could be
better than we even imagine.
No one has the faintest idea
of
w h a t   m i g h t   b e .

(AI song reference: “Following Through” by Dismemberment Plan)