Traces of Her explores how textiles can preserve memory, using pattern and surface design as vessels for personal history. Inspired by my grandmother’s life, the collection translates four stages of her life, childhood, marriage, mill work and farming, and later life, into distinct visual and material languages that reflect changing experiences, environments, and emotional connections to the home.
Through hand drawing, screen printing, embroidery, and upholstery, the project investigates how domestic textiles can become emotional archives that hold stories, familiarity, and inherited memory across generations. Drawing inspiration from archival family photographs, inherited interiors, rural landscapes, lace structures and everyday household objects, the collection combines heritage-inspired aesthetics with contemporary surface design for interior applications such as wallpaper, upholstery, cushions, lampshades, and decorative textiles.
Emotional durability and slow design are central throughout the project, positioning textiles not simply as decorative surfaces but as lasting objects of attachment and storytelling. Existing materials, reupholstered furniture, and layered textile processes celebrate longevity, repair, and the emotional value of objects that remain in the home over time.
At its heart, the project reflects on the quiet fear that stories will disappear when those who carry them are gone, while exploring how textiles can preserve fragments of lived experience through the surfaces we choose to live alongside.
