Visual artist Monica Roman Follow.Art Card

About me

Identity is what intrigues me as an artist. I am always tip-toeing the line of what my own cultural identity means to me having grown up in both Romania and the UK and investigating this sense a "split nature". Influenced by different concepts of identity as a production which is never complete, I utilise painting, drawing and photography to document a self that is perpetually in process. Myself and even my practice operates from this central defiant mantra that "You can only be both".

Movement and fluidity are the subtle guiding rhythms of my work as I like to use the viewers of my work as the audience of a staged performance that is theatrical in nature. My work also explores this feeling of absence of a displaced heritage, turning the anxiety of something missing into a vibrant aesthetic of hybridity.

Each medium I choose to use within my practice creates this sense of negotiation:
Painting allows me to explore the impact of cultural memory using the texture of the paint and brushstrokes and using colour to resist the muted, sterile expectations of assimilation. Drawing gives me the freedom of choreography as an act of autonomy that defines my own boundaries within a world that seeks to categorise them. Photography captures the fragmented and the liminal. It acts as a diary echoing the experience of moving through spaces where one's heritage feels momentarily erased or invisible. To be "unsettled" is not to be lost, it is to embrace a multifaceted existence that resists categorisation.

In a world that demands simplicity, my practice is an affirmation of complexity: a celebration of the irreducible power of duality.