Cyprus College of Art Residency Reflection

After being home almost a week, I think it's time for me to look back at my Cyprus trip, reminisce, and reflect on some work and my experience there.

The studio:

 

As you arrive to the college studios, you feel slightly overwhelmed by the space that is provided for you as you are still getting accustomed to the place and climate. It took me a couple of days to get the courage to go up into the studios and pick a space that I would call my own for the next two weeks, but I instantly fell in love with the bottom room of the building where dappled light streamed onto the walls around midday. Then it became my playground.
I had no intention of the work I wanted to do here, I went with an empty journal and mind and used only things I found on site and in Lemba. This was far more exciting as it meant I got to engage with the local surroundings and could explore independently, whilst documenting it with my camera and journal.
My inspiration came to me in the form of my first swim in the ocean. I was completely taken aback by the purity of the water and its clear colours. As soon as I got in, I felt at home and was floating on my back with the sun on my face (salt in my eyes!) and I remember that visceral experience so vividly that it stuck with me throughout my time there and still now. The water was like another dimension for me and that's what began my thinking into colour, form and line, and how I would be able to make something that felt immersive.
Taking photo's of the ocean wouldn't do it justice I feel, it's something so vast and encompassing that a single image can not convey that sensory experience- so I began collecting objects and putting them in my space. Blue items kept finding their way into it, I really believe the colour has a strong impact on how I connected to the water so it made it easier in a way to select certain things. The space was craving for things to be assembled in there and so I began arranging my found objects on different levels, hanging some, standing others up around the space. Each element worked well on it's own but together they created an almost micro submerged world, where each part was perfectly in balance and co-existing. Just like in nature.
It was important for me look at the environment I was in then, how the various layers of the land formed around me and what it meant to be in such a different landscape than what I was used too. With this new mind-set, I began to experience my surroundings differently, looking at the space, colour and line and how each connects to the other in nature. This led me to many discarded objects that I found around the college site (some previously made by other artists) and I re appropriated them as part of my installation, using the whole space (after some discussion with a fellow artist) as a canvas to work on. There was a lot of movement in the space and it was freeing to work in such a physical way with no restrictions, it allowed me to try a lot of things out and document what was successful, and what wasn't as great. I kept coming back to the notion of interconnectedness, and how all elements of the natural world link in with one another, I applied this to my space and it began to unfold in front of me quite organically.
With it being so warm and having lights in the studio, we could work into the night as we pleased and I seemed to have a lot of creative energy in the evening and wanted to discuss work with fellow artists there, two of which also did installation/ site specific works. It was really helpful to receive other's opinions on my work in progress, I find the conversations you have spontaneously with other artists in the moment quite enlightening and I was able to take away useful things from that. 
By this time, I had just been scuba diving, which was an intense, incredible experience for me and it opened up a whole new perspective, literally. Being submerged under the water as opposed to swimming on the surface, gave me such visual stimulation as well as the feeling of weightlessness under water which is difficult to describe if you haven't experienced it for yourself. My sense of time was non existent and you forget where you are as you swim across the sandy floor bed and between coral. This made me feel so much more connected to the work I was creating and I began painting on a piece of found canvas cloth, geometric shades of blue and green which I felt was a side piece to the installation as they all shared this subject.
It seemed as though I got more work done in the last 5 days than altogether, and we had an informal group event where we invited each other and Margaret to our studio spaces to discuss our work and ideas. Seeing people in the installation I had pieced together was really special and the feedback I received was so very encouraging. I wanted the space to be a tangible, interactive representation of my experience there, as well as push my boundary of creative response. This was my first time working in a space, this big, independently and it was so exciting to be able to watch the slow process of building something from nothing.
I photographed my space as it evolved and also did a couple of videos in the space at different times of the day when the light transformed the way it looked. That was one of my favourite elements of the room, when the afternoon sun filtered in through the corrugated plastic roof, it left patterns on the wall as if it were reflections of the waters surface. I felt submerged in the space and watching the light move around the studio added to the surreal atmosphere of it.
On the morning when I was due to leave, I visited my studio for one last time (obviously it would be difficult to take my piece home on the plane..) and experienced it in it's eerie solitude. The gentle movements of the hanging frame, the light on the wall, the chipped tiles and various shades of blue around the room looked a little sombre but I was proud that I could leave a part of myself there and take a part of Cyprus back with me.