"Reflections. No. 1" Drawing

Nadiia Rom is a Ukrainian artist based in London.
She graduated from the Poltava National Polytechnic University in Ukraine, where she was studying architecture. She worked as an architect and an interior designer in Ukraine and Europe.
In 2016 she turns to painting and now exhibits in Europe and UK.
Nadiia came to London in 2023 and she works in oils and pastels, creating figurative and abstract compositions. She is a recipient of several awards.

What my art is about:
I am a Ukrainian painter based in London. My practice explores the relationship between memory, place and the ways people preserve a sense of self while adapting to change.
Rather than treating home as a fixed location, I am interested in the elements that make it portable. I ask what people carry with them when they can no longer carry the place itself. Memories, everyday rituals, domestic gestures, familiar objects and ways of inhabiting space become invisible structures through which identity survives displacement and new places gradually become home.
Working primarily in oil and dry pastel, I build my paintings through careful observation of quiet details that often go unnoticed: an unmade bed, shifting light, traces of use, folded fabric, an empty interior or the relationship between a house and its landscape. These ordinary elements are not symbols but evidence of human presence. They reveal how places absorb experience and continue to carry it over time.
Research is an essential part of my practice. Each project begins with a question rather than a conclusion and develops through observation, walking, reading, conversation and painting. My recent work explores how memory exists not only within people but also within objects, architecture and landscapes, and how places participate in shaping identity long after lives, borders or circumstances have changed.
My own experience of rebuilding life in a new country informs these questions, but my work is not autobiographical. I am interested in shared human experiences of belonging, loss, continuity and adaptation. Through painting, I seek to make visible the quiet processes through which people reconstruct a sense of home and preserve identity across changing places, generations and histories.