Roslyn is a Seattle-based independent artist who creates narrative art and finished products.
Her work centers around family narratives drawing on themes of her own family's migrations to different regions of the United States and the plants which served to build core memories of what rooted them to particular locations.
In graduate school, she developed a technique which integrated physical art media (watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink) and digital mixed media. In 2018, she began to integrate these skills with surface design for fabric when working as a consultant for Katherina "Tina" Siemens on her own family history project.
While many of the designs that Roslyn created for Tina were based on written records, Roslyn found that such records were sparse in her own family in part due to historical high illiteracy rates among Black southern families.
Roslyn learned that although there were not many written records in her own family, there were photographs of relatives. She pivoted her focus towards portraiture of her own relatives based on older family portraits and recording the oral history of her family visually based on information that family members shared with her.
In the past, Roslyn has received awards for her work and displayed her work in various spaces in the Seattle area.
Today, in addition to creating portraits and finished compositions, Roslyn also creates hand sewn accessories and encourages others to share the story behind their own artwork. She is currently a member of the Inscape artist collective in Seattle and the art rotation manager at Zoka Coffee Roasters near University Village.
Gattacho (IPA: [gataːtʃo]) is from the Italian word "gattaccio" that means 'bad little cat'. Originally used to refer to my first cat who had plenty of 'tude and would slap our Italian friend, the name stuck with my sewing business because she was always by my side when I cut measured and sewed my fabric.
Although the original gattacho has since passed, there have been others who have joined our family and sat by my side as I work on my art.
