Black Earth United | Jocelyn Rice

Jocelyn Rice is a regenerative clothing designer and artist whose work exists at the intersection of garment making, and Black speculative futures. Through her practice, Black Earth United, Jocelyn transforms reclaimed coveralls, and designs garments that function as vessels of memory, protection, and cultural storytelling for us to wear. 

Jocelyn’s practice begins with recovery. She gathers reclaimed materials, deadstock fabrics and personal archives as a way to return to nature and to remember who we are and where we come from. Through construction and reconstruction, garments become vessels, carrying story, ancestry, and place inviting a deeper relationship to land, lineage, and time.

Influenced by Black Quantum Futurism, nature, Harriet Tubman, ancestral craft traditions, Jocelyn approaches time as nonlinear. Past, present, and future exist simultaneously within her work. Domestic craft becomes a language. Through these transformations, she challenges dominant design systems rooted in extraction and mass production, proposing regenerative models grounded in relationship, land, and community care.

Jocelyn intentionally designs, marks, dyes, writes on, and alters garments by hand, allowing process and ritual to remain visible. Each piece carries evidence of labor and lived experience, inviting viewers to consider clothing as living memory rather than static object.

Her work asks what knowledge survives within material, and what futures can be created when new and discarded objects, stories, and histories are reclaimed and reimagined.