Freedom

A woman from Iran, two years an asylum seeker in Cyprus, paints herself with hair that turns into the open sea, a sun rising gold behind her, and a horse running free in the distance. Emma's work moves through past, present, and future, from a life of covering and constraint toward a freedom she can taste but not yet fully hold, anchored by the light that, since she found a new faith, has guided her.

STORIES FROM CYPRUS

6/15/20262 min read

Through all of it, she names what keeps her standing. Art, she says, is the only medium that helps her still stand. Not decoration, not pastime, but the thing that holds her upright through the waiting and the unresolved status and the distance from everything she knew. Her home, she says, is with the heart, carried inside her wherever the paperwork sends her.

Her painting gathers it all into one image: the constrained past in the hair she once had to cover, the liberated present in the sea it becomes, the hoped-for future in the running horse, and above everything the sun that lights her way. Past, present, and future, held in a single frame, and the word she gave to all of it. Freedom.

Look first at her hair. On one side it falls dark and long, and on the other it dissolves into the sea, becoming waves, becoming water, a small white paper boat riding the current it makes. This is the heart of Emma's painting and the heart of her story. In her past, she says, her life was very limited. She had to cover her hair. The constraint was not metaphor but daily reality, one of the specific unfreedoms placed on women in the country she left. So, when she paints her hair flowing loose and merging with the ocean, she is painting liberation itself. I can have my hair free, like the sea. There is so much feeling in that image: the openness of the water, the refusal to be bound or hidden, the body finally allowed to be itself.

Behind her head she placed a sun, gold and radiant, like a halo. The sun, she says, is the symbol that has enlightened her life. Emma underwent a profound personal transformation, leaving the faith she was raised in and becoming Christian, and from that change she draws her central light. The sun rises through the whole composition as the emblem of what she has moved toward. Beside her, woven into the work, are the patterns of her heritage, the Persian calligraphy and the blue tilework that mark her as a woman of Iran even as she becomes someone new. She does not erase where she comes from. She carries it, in script and pattern, into the life she is building.

But her freedom is not complete, and she is honest about it. She has been in Cyprus for two years, and she is still an asylum seeker, still living in the long uncertainty of the in-between, still without the full freedom she longs for. So she paints toward the future, and for that future she chose another image: the horse, dark and running through a golden field at the edge of the canvas. In my new life I can be free like a horse. Unbridled, powerful, moving across open ground with no one to hold the reins.

HERS

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

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