This feature was conceived as a foray into the hearts/minds of Kenyon’s finest artists through the pages of their sketchbooks. This week, we talk with Rosa Rumora ’19.

Rosa Rumora is a senior Studio Art Major who enjoys working with a variety of mediums. She is also an avid baker with professional experience and future interest in the field of bread and pastries. A recent assignment for the senior Studio Art major was to create a piece with one hundred of something. A combination of the desire to work with soft sculpture and inspiration from sifting through her peers’ dirty clothes while working for the rummage sale led her to socks, a new medium for Rosa.

“It’s a fun adventure because I can ask people for their favorite lonely socks”, she says. “I’m not going to cut off sock collection. I don’t know how defining myself as a sock artist will be at all a productive thing…but I’m still playing around with them.”

Although art that Rosa produces in the kitchen is edible (and very delicious), the art she produces in the studio clearly is not. Yet there are similarities between her passions.

“There is a lot of patience involved. When I bake, especially bread, you’re kind of dealing with this live creature (yeast). It’s growing and you have to wait for it to do its own thing. It’s like a pet. It’s the same with making art- not just socks- but being patient with it as its own creature. You have to shut your brain off and let it make itself. Which sounds weird because people see baking and art as these really involved processes, but you’re kind of just there as a guiding hand.”

It is clear that Rosa appreciates the more dynamic and natural aspects of art. Her style is full of life and movement. On what yeast and dirty socks have in common, she says, “There’s a theme in both of letting what you produce have its own life. You eat one, not the other.”

Some of Rosa’s mini pies, sketches, and her sock soft sculpture hanging in her studio.