What immaterial parts of ourselves and the human experience can we come to know through the material discards of our lives?
Sommer Roman’s work is invested in the realms of the body, the wild, the playground, and the domestic sphere and creates alluring visual experiences that draw us back to our wild selves. She works with mundane materials associated with those realms such as: post-consumer clothing, nature items, toilet paper, and domestic building materials and plant and human based imagery. Through intuitive & laborious hand-made processes the materials and images are broken down, manipulated, bound, braided, sewn, glued, folded, and reconstructed. In this process of deconstruction-construction, hierarchies are conflated, domesticity, disconnectedness, and rampant consumerism are dismantled and the results are curious and absurd hybrids of plant, animal, and human existing in an interdependent, sensuous & playful orbit. Through evocative color, organic forms, materiality, the universal circular form, and unabashed exuberance, Roman’s work invites viewers back to the realm of interconnectedness, play, the wild feminine, and the body as potent sites of wisdom and innate aliveness.
Her work holds conceptual links to historical and contemporary movements within craft, feminism, and surrealism.
