NIL NIL
I started NIL NIL (formerly Grandpa Brand) in 2020. I design, make, and market the jackets/apparel. 
Somehow it all got out of control. It was just a thing I’d started doing during the pandemic to ease the boredom. Go out to the nature preserve a few blocks away, listen to murder podcasts, gather dew berries, cut kudzu. And suddenly it was everyday I’d be boiling whatever thing I’d gotten enough of that day, gathering up yards of fabric and sticking them in that tea and letting it soak until it stained. I didn’t know how to sew, but I had yards and yards of dyed fabric around the house now so I figured I’d better learn. I liked that whatever I was going to make was going to still be connected to the land. The fabric came up from it, the color too, came up from the land. And I couldn’t really think of anything else I’d want to make besides jackets, so I went about learning how to make a jacket.
And I learned (see above). I moved from Atlanta to the Catskills, and became really interested in quilts. What can I say, I liked thinking about how women’s artistic expression was also a communal practice. I started to research and incorporate quilt patterns into my practice. And I started to sell. But when I moved to Los Angeles I had to adjust: there were no nature preserves to pillage— I started using denim I’d find at the Goodwill bins.
In sorting out how to market my work, I knew I wanted to have the jackets in nature— as I said before, up from the land. Yes, from the land, but not part of the land. I started taking photographs on my hikes through Griffith Park, and fooling around with in photoshop with some ideas and it (for me really lands) these ghost-like jackets strangely existing adjacent to the natural world. Me, trying my best to give the material some sort of second life, a new usefulness. 
