Art professor's work displayed at Smithsonian Institute's Environmental Research Center
Sheila Goloborotko, a University of North Florida associate professor of art and design, has been selected to have her work included in the portfolio of prints “Altered Environments”, curated by April Flanders, professor of studio art at Appalachian State University, and co-sponsored by the Marine Bio invasions Lab at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and Pyramid Atlantic.
This printmaking portfolio includes 25 national and international artists from diverse backgrounds that utilize a wide range of styles and print techniques to respond to the issue of marine bio invasions. The collection seeks to spark a conversation between art and science where viewers are confronted by the uninhibited exchange of plant and animal organisms across natural boundaries—and complicacy in generating destructive organisms and globalized landscapes.
Goloborotko’s piece is inspired by Botryllus Schlosseri, a colonial sea squirt that grows on a variety of surfaces, including docks, boat hulls, buoys, ropes, pilings and the undersides of rocks and on mussels—often doing well in polluted waters. She created a reduction screenprint and layered eight transparent and opaque colors on Japanese Masa paper in an ideal merging of method and message, inviting viewers into the chaos to find meaning and to engage in important questions about the human relationship with nature, information and one another.
Goloborotko’s creative research focuses on print media as the graphic science of democracy—a tool that fosters community building and information sharing to create new socio-political ecologies. She investigates ways that feasibility, sustainability and venture creation are the natural outgrowths of ethical printmaking and a grassroots-run, people-powered society.
The portfolio of prints was showcased at the Pyramid Atlantic Center in Maryland, at Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in North Carolina, and the Clear Lake Art Gallery in Texas. It was recently presented at the XI International Conference on Marine Bio invasions. The project is now part of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center Collection.