Decay is how life continues, yet many modern deathcare practices transform the body’s final act into a harmful one — interrupting decomposition, introducing toxins, and separating human matter from the systems that sustain it. What would it mean to design death differently: to allow the body to return to the earth in a way that is both ecologically generative and culturally meaningful? How can beauty, care, and ritual be preserved while the material reality of death is brought back into alignment with natural cycles?

FINAL FORM is a kelp-based burial garment that treats death as an act of reintegration rather than containment. The piece functions as a hybrid organism: part garment, part ecosystem, part ritual, tying the body back to the ground where it can nourish microbial life and support regeneration. In this framing, our relationship to the natural world shifts from harm to exchange, allowing the body to enter a symbiotic relationship with the living world. Life, understood materially, does not end; it disperses and continues.