BENGALURU: In Cubbon Park, Romicon Revola has made her sculpture out of 25 feet fallen tree trunk and steel. Titled Metamorphisis, she talks about how this project materialised, “During the heavy rains of the last moonsoon, one huge Solver Oak tree fell. Instead of chopping up the trunk, the park’s director invited me to instead use it as an artwork.”
Coincidently, the country’s 70th Independence Day was around the corner and Romi decided to come up with an idea that would commemorate India’s independence. “What I did was carve a caterpillar using the trunk. It also features 70 stainless steel butterflies emerging out of the trunk carved to symbolise a giant caterpillar,” she adds. Metamorphosis can be seen an analogy for the evolution of a person, a state or a nation, Romi says.
Another installation called ‘Urbanscape’ at the Hilton hotel in Embassy Golflinks, Domlur comprises of a steel tree, a sphere, and a hemisphere. It tries to invoke the “organic in a concrete setting”. The spheres symbolise twigs and weaver bird nests. Another work called the ‘Biosphere’ at Manyata Tech Park is a big globe that was finished just two weeks ago.
Romicon Revola has been an artist for over 10 odd years and what sets her apart from traditional sculptors in the country who usually work with stone or wood, is the fact that besides metal she also works with unique elements such as turmeric and water colours. “As an artist, one continuously experiment and metal was something of a new material in terms of art when I first took it up. It is a medium in sculpturing that is less explored,” she says. For centuries people have worked with either stone but it is only in the last few decades that people have been really experimenting with metal and this is what that excited Romi. “It is definitely not easy, but it is a challenge worth taking. To make something out of cold and industrial metal and adding your own sentimentality to it, so that it touches people is something that I will always love to do,” she says.
Romi has trained in sculpture at the late Bruce Chappel’s Sculpture Atelier in San Francisco and has been Bengaluru since 2006. Some of her other works have been in the World Trade Center, Kochi, ISDO, Ahmedabad and Beaumonde, Mumbai. She also does indoor installations and her most recent work called the ‘Cosmic Bloom: Iconography for a Re-imagined World Order’ will be exhibited very soon. In this work she,”seeks to “explore new archetypes, even revive forgotten mythologies as a response to the several inter-connected and tangential issues surrounding sustainability, consumption, geology and ecology.”