Grandma's Ghost

Grandma's Ghost

Grandma's Ghost is an interactive clothesline installation comprised of printed lengths of sheer chiffon hung on clotheslines with clothespins.

The imagery on the sheer textile panels features a cast of characters based on a toy snowman character mold. The snowman figure was one of the molded objects created for a previous artwork, Pantry/ Sampler. This little snowman figure was so impactful on Roxy’s psyche that she describes a moment in her studio when “the snowman spoke to her,” it became the focus of this artwork: Grandma's Ghost. 

The snowman figure represents a collective “cultural entanglement” of figures from the artist's past, including Casper, the friendly ghost, the Michelin Man, Venus D’ Villensdorf, the stay-puff Marshmallow man, twins, clowns, the devil, smily face doorknobs, white men, blonde women, and fertility goddesses. The figure(s) act as an identity avatar, representing various states of being—real and imagined, male and female- gay and straight, white and other. Themes of body image, science fiction, metaphysics, nature, and political thought. These characters embody a duality: seemingly cheerful and benign, yet clownish and dark, (a) symbols of contrast.

Grandma's Ghost is a multi-step process artwork that began its initial phase with ceramics and slip molds. The printed images on the chiffon were first created in ceramics. The multistepped process involved making a two-part slip-cast snowman mold, fired and glazed as full or half figures. Next, the ceramic figures were photographed, reimagined with digital tools, and fabricated using a commercial printing company. The resulting images are printed on organza textiles, allowing the layered images to be experienced as ethereal floating entities.