Shadow Drawings, Olive Trees, Nicosia. 2018
These works were developed in response to the contested medieval city of Nicosia, today the sixteenth century Venetian walls encompass a city that exists in two halves, separated by an empty space; a void, known as the Green Line, patrolled by the United Nations peacekeeping forces (UNFICYP). The Green Line obstructs the flow of movement across the city, barriers creating dead ends. In the south, the tourist maps do not depict the north, and vice versa, creating incomplete pictures of the city. What was once the city centre has become an edge, and Nicosia, the capital city that was once in the middle of Cyprus, is displaced to the edge.
During my residencies at NiMAC (The Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre) away from the darkroom, I developed a practice of making cyanotypes ‘en plein air’, working in olive trees with sunlight, a performative act, a shift in my practice marking the beginning of ‘shadow drawings’. It was important to make cyanotypes in the separated Turkish and Greek zones of Nicosia, however the city’s weather was a shared experience; the sun and wind that makes the cyanotypes flows across boarders, it doesn’t recognise the political boundaries designated by the Green Line. The sun, that ripens the olives, created the shadows that made the ‘Shadow Drawings’. When watching the light falling on the prepared paper (waiting for the duration of the exposure) the sounds of the city could be heard travelling across the Green Line, especially the amplified sound of the call to prayers.
In the unfamiliar city, I felt most comfortable working in public spaces; parks, car parks and on street corners, these were strangely intimate places, nobody paid me or my actions any attention, it was if I was invisible, after all I was a tourist, an outsider. I wanted to observe and record this extraordinary place.
Each cyanotype was exposed for minutes rather than fractions of a second, a blink of an eye, or the snap of a camera shutter; each cyanotype is unique, a physical object, they vary, each print seems to hold something of the actual experience of duration. The individual acts of making the prints were cumulative, resulting in one work of twenty-six cyanotypes.
In the gallery, each print is attached directly to the wall, side by side in two horizontal lines, they hang slightly away from the wall. There is no disclosure of where the prints were made, whether in the north or the south. The series is presented to be seen as a whole, as one, a rectangular block. The images together appear to be undulating, moving in the wind, shifting without being grounded. The blue is that of the sky, reminiscent of a flag, similar in colour to the Greek flag.
The Cypriot flag (adopted in 1960), has a silhouette of the undivided island with crossed olive branches beneath. A symbol of peace that dates from the 5th century BC. the olive tree is thought to be blessed and the oil from the olive believed to be sacred.
