Y A N K E E   L O N D O N  S T U D I O

Musings from a Yankee artist abroad in London...
Neptune's Goblet
Picture
The trip to Oxford's Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum coalesced like some metaphysical experiment. One minute you're at Victoria Station in bustling London, and the next you find yourself in a quiet university town, complete with fantastical Harry Potter vignettes and hidden university courtyards. Another metaphysical twist was encountering Cliona patera, also known as Neptune's Goblet, a sea sponge thought to have become extinct in the early 1900s--only to pop back up on history's timeline a hundred years later, in 2011. Oxford's specimen captured my attention with its stippled surface, exposed fissures and its interior cellular structure revealed by erosion and punctuated time. Three days after encountering Neptune's Goblet, I photographed the piece below... it was finished before I even stepped foot in Oxford. Only by looking at it through a photographic lens could I see the similarities and synchronicity.
"Embracing counterpoints, like moments of stillness found within chaos, I use a range of materials in my work: drawings, paintings, ceramics, printmaking, video, installation and sculpture."

Romi Sloboda was born in the United States and spent her childhood living in both the United States and her mother's native city, Seoul, Korea. She studied printmaking at the Santa Reparata Graphic Arts Centre in Florence, and received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA from London Metropolitan University. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States as well as in Europe. She has been awarded residencies from the Cité Internationale des Arts Fondation in Paris, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the Herekeke Arts Center in New Mexico. Romi currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom.