Josie Love Roebuck: SKIN + MASKS, Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St.

Josie Love Roebuck (b. 1995, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist who blends the methods of drawing, painting, and textiles to create layered, narrative images that symbolize the complexities of her biracial identity. 

As Roebuck explored various artistic mediums, she found that sewing conveyed certain metaphorical qualities related to healing that allowed her to express the complexities of growing up in a family that didn’t look like her. The work is rooted in the idea of juxtaposition of perspectives. 

“I’m in this middle zone, hearing my Black friends and their perspective, and my white parents and their perspective,” Roebuck says. “I’m sharing these two moments and two perspectives that I have and also quilting them together. That process shares what I need to change and grants a healing perspective that needs to occur in order for us to move on and learn from our past.” 

Roebuck is a fan of the cutouts of Henri Matisse, which Matisse began making after suffering from debilitating illness that prevented him from painting. Roebuck makes her cutouts from wood and then softens the toughness of the material with yarn and other delicate mediums. 

Although they are sewn together like textiles, Roebuck’s works contain elements of painting, drawing, sculpture and collage. Working on unstretched canvas for a surface, she paints, uses screen printing ink, embroiders, and glues wood cutouts to the paintings. 

The process of patchwork itself symbolizes the pain, triumph, exclusion, and acceptance the artist has felt while grappling with her personal history. 

In her paintings, Roebuck symbolically deploys images of plants that are local to where she grew up, such as the leaves of rattlesnake plantains, which she uses to symbolize rebirth, and mountain laurels, which symbolize hope and home. “I use these to symbolize healing out history and changing it for the better,” Roebuck says.