ROMMY BARRIGA CANO

ARTIST BIO

Rommy is a Bolivian visual artist, computer scientist, and game designer whose work unfolds between art, technology, and lived transformation. She began exhibiting her visual work in collective shows during her early years and was part of the artist group that created “El Encuentro”, the largest mosaic wall in the city of Cochabamba—an artwork later recognized as a piece of cultural significance for the city.

Trained in computer science, Rommy went on to specialize in UX design, game design, and business, building a professional career of over a decade in the software and interactive industries. During this period, visual art receded as her technological practice expanded, though it never disappeared.

A cancer diagnosis in 2023 marked a profound return. During treatment and recovery, she came back to manual artistic practice not as a career shift, but as a reconnection with something essential. Working with watercolour, pastel, charcoal, and acrylic, her process is slow and attentive, guided by listening rather than control. Flowers, dreaming figures, and quiet natural forms recur as meditations on fragility, endurance, eternity and renewal.

Her work has been shown in collective exhibitions in Bolivia, the United States, and Spain. Rommy’s practice bridges the handmade and the computational, affirming art as a way of returning to one’s own soul.


ARTIST STATEMENT

My art is born from a belief that everything—everyone—has a soul. Including me. Each time I lift a pencil, a brush, or a finger of soft pastel, I am never beginning from emptiness. There is already something whispering, waiting.

The imagery that emerges is spiritual and ethereal, shaped by inner states rather than external narratives. When inspiration flows freely, the process is gentle and swift: watercolour moves like a dream, acrylic settles into meditation, and calm arrives before I am even aware of my breath. At other times, creation resists. I struggle with emotion, with uncertainty, with not yet understanding. I scratch at the surface, press heavy charcoal into the page, and remain with the pressure until confusion clarifies—until darkness becomes translucent, and what was blurred turns precise.

This transformation is central to my work: like charcoal becoming diamond, meaning reveals itself through intensity and time. Each finished piece feels like a small miracle. The struggle dissolves, the noise falls away, and what remains is quiet, spiritual, and newly born.

The work is never mine to keep. It is offered—to be held, witnessed, and to remind us that beneath all the weight, the soul is still listening.