We recently connected with Sommer Roman and have shared our conversation below.

Sommer, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?

I am happy living the life of an artist/creative. Would it be easier to have a “regular job”?… oh yes it would! But in my opinion living out one’s true purpose and who we we’re made to be and do what we’re made to do is worth all of it’s weight in gold and I would never trade that. Obviously for me that is being an artist, which has been a path I’ve really had to forge by myself. Though I might daydream of the ease of having a more straight forward career, nothing in my soul really wants a different path. It’s taken a lot to get to where I am living and working as who I was made to be and that brings deep contentment.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an interdisciplinary artist and I create work that is an invitation back to ourselves to recover our innate wildness and aliveness. I recently got access to my childhood home after many years of not having access. And rummaging through the hoarder house of horror I discovered some fabric stuffed stuffies that I had made, some drawings of Garfield, Burt & Ernie, and little writings from when I was 9 years old that said over and over again that I loved to draw and when I grew up I wanted to be an artist and teacher. And by gosh by golly, that is exactly what I am doing now at 42 years old! It was not a given path. I had zero artist or creative in my family and I had no idea that I had articulated those dreams so specifically at that early age.

When I was young, making things was my voice that was too timid to speak. It was me taking up space. It was my way of safely breaking rules and making up my own. It was my permission for joy and beauty and a sanctuary for playing and dreaming. It was my link to my truest interior, my wild, connected, sensitive, and alive self. So, even now in many ways the absolute core of my work is that same invitation back to ourselves to awaken us to our innate wildness and aliveness.

More specifically my work is invested in the realms of the body, the wild, the playground, and the domestic sphere. I work 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 manipulated, broken down, bound, braided, sewn, glued, folded, and reconstructed.  In this process of deconstruction-construction, hierarchies are conflated 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, my work invites viewers back to the realm of interconnectedness, play, the wild feminine, and the body as portals back to ourselves.

I was born and raised in California, and have lived in France and on both the East and West Coasts of the United States. I received my BA from UC Santa Cruz in 2004 in Sociology. I returned to art school in my early thirties in the DC area which ultimately led me to getting my MFA from UC Santa Barbara in 2014. Since then I have been teaching a myriad of art courses at the university level, raising young kids, and making and exhibiting my work at the national and international level.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I recently have become a single mother of two young children. I’m literally in the middle of a very large life pivot which is inherently having me completely rethink my time, my priorities, income source, providing for my kids…etc. It’s a both invigorating and vulnerable season where the ground beneath me is cracking. I don’t have all of the answers but I know for sure that I won’t be giving up my path of the artist. I have worked too hard to get here.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

-Buy and invest in art in your local community -Attend events at your local museums and venues of all the arts
-States should bring back robust art programs in all schools
-When arts are taught to be valued at a young age it raises and entire culture that does.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sommerroman.com
• Instagram: sommerroman_studio