Interior Design Textile Arts Environmental Memory
On sediment dyeing, hydrological data, and the material afterlives of the 2022 Eastern Kentucky floods
Introduction
How can we dwell within weather visually, materially, and emotionally? As extreme events like fire and flood increasingly shape daily life, weather becomes more than climate. It becomes a condition of habitation, memory, and identity.
In July 2022, catastrophic flooding struck Eastern Kentucky, transforming homes from spaces of security into sites of trauma and displacement. The water receded. It left sediment, silt, and silence.
"In the news every other day a thousand-year flood pops up in a new spot on the planet."
Bernard Clay, Troublesome Rising
This body of work asks: how do we live after the water recedes? It translates flood data and flood sediment into textile, weaving hydrological records into stitched form and returning the disaster to the land through cloth. The quilts in this series are simultaneously scientific records, cultural artifacts, and acts of grief.
The Work
The series pairs two distinct USGS data streams from the Whitesburg gauge on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. Together they tell the full hydrological story of the flood: its force, and its body.
| Quilt | Completed | Data | What it holds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discharge | 2025 | Hourly discharge (cfs) | Volume of water moving through the river |
| Stage, Part I | 2026 | Hourly gauge height (ft) | The river's physical rise and fall |
| Stage, Part II | 2026 | Hourly gauge height (ft) | Companion; completes the 24-hour record |
Discharge is dyed with sediments collected by the Kentucky Geological Survey (KGS) following the 2022 floods. Its vertical bars represent hourly discharge rates on the heaviest day of flooding, each scaled proportionally to the cubic feet per second recorded at the USGS gauge near Whitesburg, Letcher County. Pokeberry provides the only contrasting color. The hand-stitching maps the topography surrounding the gauge itself, translating the riverbed into thread.
Stage, Part I and Stage, Part II use a Welsh bar format to render 24 consecutive hourly gauge height readings from July 28, 2022 across two companion quilts. The peak recorded stage of 21.00 feet is scaled to 12 inches of fabric. The quilted pattern within the bars reflects the geological rock sediment formations at these Appalachian locations, rendered in cross-sectional form. Data becomes terrain; terrain becomes data.
This pairing is conceptually precise: Discharge shows the force of the water. The Stage quilts show the river's body. Together, they render the flood in two dimensions.
"Ought not two quilts ever be the same. You might use exactly the same material, but you would do it different. A lot of people make quilts just for your bed for to keep you warm. But a quilt is more. It represents safekeeping, it represents beauty, and you could say it represents family history."
Mensie Lee Pettway, quoted in Vanessa Kraemer Sohan, "But a quilt is more"
Pettway's insistence that a quilt is more than its materials is the organizing premise of this series. Each piece holds a different layer of the same event: chemistry, volume, height, topography, ecology. No two quilts are the same because no two measurements tell the same story.
Materials and Method
Following the 2022 floods, the Kentucky Geological Survey (KGS) collected sediment samples from across Eastern Kentucky and made them available for research. These samples became the primary dye material for the quilts.
Ground, mordanted, and simmered, they yield a palette that records the geological and chemical realities of the disaster. Iron-rich sediments produce warm ochres; clay-rich samples shift toward silvery browns. Post-dye iron baths deepen and shift the tones further. Each pigment binds sediment chemistry to lived history. The fabric does not merely represent the flood. It contains it.
The KGS collection makes this kind of material translation possible: sediment that was once evidence of destruction becomes, through dyeing, evidence of a place and a community. Scientific archive becomes textile archive.
"Dying with plants is one of the best examples of the efficiency of the empirical acquisition of expertise."
Dominique Cardon
Cardon's observation holds across plant and mineral dye traditions alike. The process of extracting color from flood sediment is slow, empirical, and deeply attentive to material. It requires learning what the sediment wants to give, how it responds to heat and mordant and time. This kind of knowledge is not separate from scientific understanding. It is a form of it.
Alongside the KGS sediments, local Appalachian plants provide additional color. Pokeberry (Phytolacca americana) provides the most visible contrast in Discharge. Historically, Appalachian communities boiled it three times to remove its poison and made it into poke salad during times of food scarcity. Scholar Laura Peemoeller writes that pokeweed acts as a cultural agent, carrying kinship with water landscapes and the memory of survival. By incorporating it alongside flood sediments, the work holds danger and nourishment together. That is the same contradiction the flood itself embodied.
"The art-making process became a tool not just for learning about science but for enacting methodologies within nature that science uncovers."
Nicole Nehrig, With Her Own Hands, p. 67
Nehrig is describing how making and knowing become inseparable in this kind of practice. Dyeing with KGS sediments is not illustrating science after the fact. It is enacting the methodology of the geologist, the hydrologist, and the textile artist simultaneously. The studio becomes a lab without abandoning what makes it a studio.
Theoretical Framework
This project sits at the intersection of interior design theory, material culture studies, and what Nicole Nehrig calls craftivism: the use of arts as a means of resistance against, and memorialization of, loss. The quilts are not illustrations of these ideas. They are instances of them.
"The individual not only has a history which an observer may unravel and describe, but he is history and makes history by virtue of memorial activity in which past, present, and future are created as mutually interacting modes of time."
Hans Loewald
Loewald's formulation is useful here because it refuses to separate a person from their temporal experience. The flood did not happen to Eastern Kentucky and then leave. It is happening still, in the decisions being made, the homes not rebuilt, the sediment deposited. These quilts operate in that same ongoing present. They do not document the flood from a safe distance. They are continuous with it.
"Cultural memory is a form of collective memory embodied in texts, rites, monuments, celebrations, and other objects that serve as reminders of important events and their meanings. When ways of life are threatened, textile traditions become especially important as carriers of cultural information."
Nicole Nehrig, With Her Own Hands, p. 150
"Cloth tells stories, records histories, and shapes culture in a synergistic interaction that makes it impossible to disentangle the effect of one on the other."
Nicole Nehrig, With Her Own Hands, p. 154
Nehrig's argument becomes especially urgent in Appalachian contexts, where textile traditions have long served as forms of collective witness. These quilts participate in that tradition while also extending it: they carry not just the hand of the maker but the chemistry of the land, the readings of a federal gauge, the geological record of a flood. The data and the cloth are not separate tracks. They converge in the fabric itself.
Melissa Meyer's concept of femmage, the tradition of women's collage, assemblage, and textile work as serious artistic and intellectual practice, provides a further frame. R. Howard Bloch's reading of the Bayeux Tapestry as cultural memory, and Janet Catherine Berlo's extension of that framework to embroidery more broadly, suggest that this kind of making creates what Berlo calls "a cultural memory for those of us who seek to understand the long history of the poetics of embroidery, and our places in it." That long history is also a climate history: Hayeur Smith found that Greenlandic textiles from the 1300s recorded temperature shifts in their warp-to-weft ratios. Cloth holds what other records sometimes cannot.
"A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability."
Gaston Bachelard
When flooding destroys a house, it does not only remove shelter. It removes the accumulated atmospheric archive of a life. Walter Benjamin's assertion that "to live is to leave traces" becomes newly urgent in this context: flood covers traces in silt, or erases them entirely. The quilts in this series work against that erasure, transforming silt itself into a new kind of trace. The sediment that covered homes in Letcher County is now bound into fabric. The disaster is not simply remembered. It is materially present.
Craft and Recovery
Appalachian textile traditions offer both continuity and adaptability in the face of disaster. Unlike emergency shelter, which provides minimal protection and no cultural continuity, craft embodies belonging and place.
bell hooks writes of quilts that they can "spark a spirit of transcendent survival." That phrase is not metaphor here. It describes what happens when a community's own materials are returned to it in a form it can use.
"When we work to protect our community as well as the earth which is our witness, the ground on which we stand, we create the conditions for harmony, fellowship, peace."
bell hooks, Belonging
hooks connects protection of community to protection of land. These quilts attempt the same connection. The KGS sediments that dye the fabric are literally the ground of Eastern Kentucky. To make cloth from that ground, to stitch it and bind it and hang it, is to enact the care that hooks describes.
"In belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, at-homeness, a knitting of self and world."
Scott Russell Sanders, Settling Down
Sanders' word "knitting" is not incidental. The tactile metaphor of textile runs through nearly every description of belonging, of home, of connection to land. Robin Wall Kimmerer describes making as reciprocity, a dialogue between people and plants. Louis Kahn once asked what a brick wants. Brick wants to be an arch, he said. The flood wanted to be a quilt. Its data, its sediment, and its chemistry asked for stitching, for color, for form. This series is an attempt to answer that asking.
"Fundamental to the culture of belonging is a strong sense of reciprocal connection to the land where one lives."
Carol Lee Flinders, Rebalancing the World
These acts of making embody the West African principle of Sankofa: to retrieve the past in order to move forward. Each stitch recalls what has been lost while imagining new ways of living within weather. The quilt transforms hydrological data into warmth, texture, and belonging. Like a community rebuilding itself piece by piece, it turns evidence into empathy.
Afterlife of the Work
The development of these textiles is ongoing, and their afterlives are intentionally open-ended. The goal is for this work to serve as connective tissue between communities experiencing loss through flooding: Letcher County, and others worldwide.
Exhibition plans include collaboration with local community arts groups in Eastern Kentucky, creating opportunities for dialogue, remembrance, and healing. The work will also be positioned within broader conversations about climate events, including Hurricane Helene, contributing to a transregional understanding of how communities materialize resilience.
"To live is to leave traces."
Walter Benjamin
If flooding erases our traces, covering them in silt, then making becomes a way of retrieval. The KGS sediments in these quilts were scientific evidence before they were dye. They still are. What changes is who can hold that evidence, and in what form. Through the transformation of sediment into textile, into quilt, into cultural artifact, interiors can bear witness to planetary change. These atmospheric inscriptions are both speculative and grounded. They retrieve ancestral knowledge while reimagining futures. They remind us that the work of interior design is not only to rebuild structures but to sustain atmospheres of meaning, memory, and care.
About
Rebekah Radtke is an Associate Professor in the School of Interiors at the University of Kentucky College of Design. Her research advances interior design as a discipline capable of environmental, cultural, and social transformation.
Over more than a decade, Radtke's work has investigated how spatial design shapes communities through residential learning communities on campus, civic spaces in Lexington neighborhoods, comparative urban territories in China and the United States, and most recently the post-extraction landscapes of Appalachian Kentucky and post-mining regions of France. The method has stayed the same: long-term partnerships, fieldwork, and design proposals developed with communities rather than for them.
Since tenure in 2020, this approach has matured into a clearly articulated agenda spanning three areas: post-extraction landscapes, community resilience, and material and atmospheric research. This agenda is supported by over $1 million in career research funding, five book chapters with Routledge, Springer, and Parade Publications, and a juried international exhibition at the European Cultural Centre in Venice.
Her textile research, represented in this project, uses discharge dyeing and natural plant-based dyes derived from flood-deposited sediments collected with the Kansas Geological Survey to render hydrology visible as material. What the Water Left is the most recent expression of this practice.
Rebekah Radtke
Associate Professor
School of Interiors, College of Design
University of Kentucky
127A Gray Design Building
349 Scott St
Lexington, KY 40508
rebekah.radtke@uky.edu
+1 859 494 4684
Curriculum Vitae
University of Kentucky, School of Interiors, College of Design
Career total: $1,082,175 | Since tenure (2020): $779,280 | External since tenure: $233,466
Selected External Funding (Funded)
Selected Internal Funding (Funded since 2020)
International
National
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Beacon Press, 1958.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Harvard University Press, 1999.
Berlo, Janet Catherine. Quoted in Nicole Nehrig, With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories.
Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Sierra Club Books, 1977.
Bloch, R. Howard. Referenced in Nicole Nehrig, With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories.
Cardon, Dominique. Natural Dyes: Sources, Tradition, Technology and Science. Archetype Publications, 2007.
Clay, Bernard. Troublesome Rising.
Flinders, Carol Lee. Rebalancing the World: Why Women Belong and Men Must Change. HarperOne, 2002.
hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. Routledge, 2009.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Loewald, Hans W. Papers on Psychoanalysis. Yale University Press, 1980.
Meyer, Melissa, and Miriam Schapiro. "Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled." Heresies 4, 1978.
Nehrig, Nicole. With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories.
Peemoeller, Laura. Referenced in Nicole Nehrig, With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories.
Sanders, Scott Russell. "Settling Down." In Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. Beacon Press, 1993.
Smith, Michèle Hayeur. Research on Greenlandic textiles and climate records. Referenced in Nehrig.
Sohan, Vanessa Kraemer. "'But a quilt is more': Recontextualizing the Discourse(s) of the Gee's Bend Quilts." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 46, no. 1 (2016): 56 to 75.
USGS National Water Information System. Gauge data for North Fork Kentucky River at Whitesburg, Letcher County, KY. July 28, 2022.