Gabriella Picone’s New Company — And Hand-Painted Silk Scarves — Were Inspired By Summers in Sicily

After working for four years at the New York design gallery R & Company, artist and RISD grad Gabriella Picone shifted to a full-time studio practice this year to pursue ceramics, painting, and textiles. Her first collection — the result of a company she founded called idda, which means “her” in Sicilian dialect and was inspired by Picone’s childhood summers in Sicily — is a series of silk and cotton scarves printed with Picone’s expressive paintings on paper. The fabrics depict elements inspired by the folklore tales Picone heard as a child — stories of mythological creatures, volcanoes, wildflowers, fruits, and the Mediterranean landscape — as well as the abstracted faces of Italian women. “On Lipari, one of the Eolian Islands where my family is from, women of all ages live in pareos throughout the hot summer months,” Picone says; the resulting textiles can be worn as a scarf or pareo, or hung on the wall as a decoration in your home and a reminder, in isolation, that summers will one day be that expansive again.