Sommer Roman transforms post-consumer textile discards to pull us inward to examine the more immaterial aspects of our lives.
More specifically, her work is invested in the realms of the body, the natural world. and the domestic sphere and creates visual experiences that draw us back to our wild and whole selves. She works with mundane materials associated with those realms and that bear the imprint of lives lived. Roman’s non-traditional approach to textiles is also a nod to her female lineage who worked with textiles through traditional methods and lived well-behaved, reserved, domestic lives. Roman’s work intends to reclaim that history by taking up space, breaking with tradition, and embracing our birthright of lively, playful, and sensual living that her foremothers weren’t able to.
Through intuitive & laborious hand-made processes the materials and images are broken down and manipulated in myriad ways. Through 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 exuberance, Roman’s work invites viewers back to the realm of interconnectedness, play, the wild feminine, the handmade, 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.
