Baptism by Fire

If I mention the word ‘College’ the image that probably comes to mind immediately is that of a group of bland, modern buildings set in flat grounds carpeted with neat lawns. A sterile, streamlined scene. Now picture the accommodation - a smallish, plain bedroom, simply furnished, possibly also with a shower/toilet en-suite. Down the corridor is the modernish, fitted, basic kitchen and somewhere in the block is the laundry room. That was roughly what I expected when I signed up for the Cyprus College of Art. After all, that was what I had seen when I’d delivered my daughter (plus van load of paraphernalia) to college in London.

So what I encountered when I arrived that October evening in 2003 came as quite a shock.

Had I done my research? Yes, I had used the then limited resources that a slow and not-so-all-encompassing internet service could provide. If you wanted feedback from past students you really had to dig deep because social media was still in its infancy, and Facebook wouldn’t be launched until a year later.

Anyway, I wasn’t really inclined to look too far because I just needed to get away, and

it’s probably best not to think about it too much before you jump into the unknown. Desperation or despair, or both, are usually what drive us to hurl ourselves out of our comfort one. People often call it courage. In my case it was fear - fear of staying stuck in a place that was driving me to tears on a daily basis.

I had emerged, elated, from Bath Spa University College clutching my new degree; had completed an eight-month-long Fellowship in Stone Lithography; had had my first Gallery Exhibition in Somerset; had been accepted into the excellent Sherborne Contemporary Arts group. Successes, every one of them. The degree had been a good one, and the lithographs well received. The show had yielded many compliments, and yet I seemed to be going nowhere. There had been no sales from the exhibition, I had failed to win a residency that seemed made for me and I was not having any success in finding work in my new chosen field of art.

Closed doors everywhere.

The idea of leaving England began to take shape in my mind after my daughter suggested that I finally do what I had so long talked about doing - actually GO!

It was the gas-meter reader who suggested Cyprus. Seeing my borrowed travel book about Crete on the kitchen work surface, he’d asked if I was planning a holiday. ‘No,’ I’d replied, ‘I’m looking for somewhere to live.’ ‘Then I’d go to Cyprus,’ he commented. ‘More to do there.’ His remark reminded me that I’d seen adverts for the Cyprus College of Art (https://www.cypruscollegeofart.com/) in a-n Magazine (https://www.a-n.co.uk/). Rifling through the latest issue, I found the advertisement, applied and was immediately accepted.

Fast forward a few months to October. It’s evening and the hot Mediterranean sunset is hazy behind a cloud of desert sand that has blown over from North Africa. The taxi - my only option, as the last bus from Limassol to Pafos had left an hour earlier - is speeding along the ‘new’ highway. By the time we reach Pafos night has fallen (it comes in quickly there) and we are driving around in the dark, stopping at every Kiosk to ask where Lemba is, where the college is. After all, he is a Limassol driver and doesn’t know his way around Pafos, and GPS doesn’t exist yet.

One wrong turn follows another until, after about an hour we find ourselves moving slowly down the lane that we have been assured is where the college is. A solitary street lamp lights our way past a couple of barely visible low stone buildings to our right. ‘Look out for the hands sculpture,’ we have been advised, and suddenly there they are, picked out by the car’s headlamps, just to the left as we come round a bend. They are big and blue and mounted atop a pair of thick steel reinforcing rods, just in front of stone wall that seems to have an opening to the left of it.

The Hands Sculpture outside the accommodation block in Lemba.

I ask the driver to wait while I investigate, and cautiously descend uneven steps towards a bare light bulb that gleams about twenty metres away. Under it a dilapidated sofa with ripped covers leans against the wall of the building, and a couple of old rush-seated chairs lean precariously on the uneven stone floor. A balding man, in his late thirties, sits, smoking, a can of beer in his other hand.

Yes, this is the Cyprus College of Art, he affirms. No, there are no staff members around. Choose an unclaimed room in one of the surrounding annexes, and if you want food and drink you’d better hurry to the local supermarket before they close. Oh, it’s about five minutes walk away, and they close in ten!

I collected my case from the taxi, paid him and made my way at top speed to the nearby Papantonio to buy coffee, tea, milk and something for breakfast. I cannot, for the life of me now recall what I did about supper that night.

It probably won’t surprise you if I tell you that a couple of days later another student arrived, took one look and got the first plane out! Those of us that stayed remain forever marked by the experience, and curiously bound to each other as only those who have been through a transformative event are bound.

That arrival was just the beginning of a tale that could fill a long chapter or even yield the material for a whole book.

Stass Paraskos, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stass_Paraskos), the founder and director of the College, was of the view that Art was what mattered, and material comfort was peripheral, so it simply wasn’t necessary to have the broken solar hot water system repaired.

At this point I should point out that Cyprus gets VERY cold in winter, and that year also happened to be the wettest they’d had for seven years. That was the only time I have ever bought thermal underwear.

So it was that we ended up with an old zinc container, adapted with a watering can rose, so that we could have warm showers in winter. That would put two of the four gas cooker rings out of action when someone was boiling up hot water in two massive pans. A tad inconvenient when fourteen of us had to share that cooker. You had to make sure, when you washed your hair, to leave enough water for rinsing in the container.

Thin foam mattresses did little to soften the hard wooden palettes that were our beds, and other bedroom furniture would be anything that we could scavenge or buy cheaply from the local charity shop to make things more homely.

A bit of history now. Lemba had been a Turkish village until 1974, when the Turkish forces invaded the north and threw the island into chaos. Now the village was ‘provisionally’ occupied by Greek refugees who’d had to flee the North. Shortly after the border was re-opened in 2004 I came out of my bedroom one day to find four strange people walking around the place, the old woman in tears, pointing at this and that. then sobbing and heaving again in deeper sorrow. This had once been her home, her birthplace, her son’s birthplace…

What had once been the village mosque/school was now the exhibition space for our studios - a series of tin shacks that had been erected behind it. To the front and round the side stands the famous ‘Wall” that was one of the stops on a charabanc sight-seeing tour.

The Wall at Lemba Cyprus College of Art that has been created over the years by many visiting artists who have had residencies in the studios. Now a stop on many a sight-seeing tour.

Pointing the Way to the side entrance to the studios. In the background you can make out the roof of the erstwhile Turkish mosque/school building.

The Open Hand that welcomes you to the Studios at Lemba

The strange part of it all is that we were on the outskirts of a busy town and yet so very remote. There was no internet at the college, just one old, red ring-dial phone that sat on the desk outside. Mobile phones were still a rarity. A telephone booth on the corner of the road took telephone cards where we would stand for hours at a time talking to loved ones. Internet cafes were a bus ride away, and the nearest bus stop was a 20-minute walk away, at the bottom of a hill. It was a hot walk up in the summer!

For all the material privations, though, or perhaps just because of them, those eight months in Lemba were creatively an extraordinarily productive time. When you wash your clothes by hand on a terrace, looking out over a lush green valley and the bright blue sea beyond, when you walk to the toilet block under moonlight for a midnight wee, when you are not constantly bombarded by messages and phone calls, when you have to think ahead about shopping and be intentional about accessing the world beyond, when a green tree frog jumps onto your leg while you’re taking a cold summer shower, when you can walk a hundred meters to your studio and work any time of day or night…well, strangely enough, you do actually feel more connected, more grounded.

Admittedly, I’m looking at it all with hindsight, and I haven’t even mentioned all the interpersonal dramas that went on. Between them and the material privations the experience was rather like being on the Castaway Island in the Big Brother House. But I also know that all of us who have been ‘through’ Lemba hold the place in deep affection and often hanker for those days again.

Pitched into the unknown, confronted by wholly unexpected challenges, we each embraced the discomfort in our own particular way and were somehow transformed - and forever bound together.

Helios Beach - at the end of the day a swim down at Helios beach at the bottom of the hill was always a pleasure. It is a rare naturally sandy beach for that area. These days it has become a lot more sophisticated. In 2003 it was still an untouched delight.