08 March 2013

Designing garments for the dead

The work of research student Pia Interlandi will feature later this month on ABC TV's Artscape series.

Ms Interlandi, a fashion and industrial design PhD candidate in RMIT University's School of Architecture and Design, is a fashion designer and creator of the garment line Garments for the Grave.

Soul tells the story of Ms Interlandi's evolution from student and designer of Garments for the Grave, to practitioner, as she creates her first burial garment for a client.

The documentary features Ms Interlandi working with a client, Kaalii, who is seeking a garment to prepare herself and her family for her own death.

This collaboration further reinforces Ms Interlandi's desire to pursue her career and lifelong passion of helping families create meaningful rituals for their loved ones' deaths, through garments.

"Pia's work is very original and for an artist not yet 30, she's been highly prolific and focused in her work," Larin Sullivan, director of Soul said.

Ms Interlandi also discusses her dissolvable garments, which mimic the decomposition process that happens to a body once it has been buried.

She also outlines how her work falls within the movement, Natural Earth Burial, a new way of handling death, without a coffin or embalming and with a shallow grave.

The documentary will air on Tuesday, 26 March on ABC1.

Soul is a part of a series of 12 films, titled the Anatomy Series. These half-hour documentaries explore the ways artists/performers deal with the subject of sex, identity and the human body.

More information on the documentary can be found on the Anatomy Arts Documentaries Facebook page.

More information on Ms Interlandi's work can be found on her websites: