The Invisible Thread

A woman whose life has carried her far from home tells her story through paint, tracing the invisible thread that connects her to where she comes from. In a work rooted in nostalgia and quiet longing, she maps the bond between memory, identity, and belonging: constant, unbreakable, and always present beneath the surface of a life lived elsewhere.

STORIES FROM CYPRUS

6/14/20262 min read

There is a particular kind of loss that does not announce itself. It does not arrive with a single event or a definable wound. It settles slowly, in the small spaces between the life you are living and the life you left behind. Helia knows this feeling well. She calls it nostalgia, but the word is almost too familiar to hold everything she means by it. What she describes is something more continuous: a quiet longing that does not fade with time, a sense of having left a part of herself somewhere she cannot always return to.

She carries her roots with her. This is not a choice she makes each morning. It is simply what is true. The connection to where she comes from lives in her memories, in the particular way she moves through the world, in the instincts and values and gestures that formed before she ever knew they were forming. Distance has not dissolved any of this. If anything, distance has made it more visible.

Her painting holds this understanding at its centre.

It does not depict a specific landscape or a named place. It reaches instead toward something felt rather than seen: the emotional geography of a person who belongs, simultaneously and without contradiction, to more than one world. The work carries the quality of memory itself, present and slightly out of reach at the same time, familiar and irretrievable in equal measure.

What grounds the painting is the image of roots. Not as metaphor alone, but as lived reality. Roots as the thing that remains when everything above the surface has shifted. Roots as the part of a person that does not negotiate with circumstance. Helia does not frame her roots as something she returns to only in moments of difficulty. They are constant. They are the condition under which she experiences everything else: the new cities, the new languages, the new relationships, the new versions of herself that migration demands.

The invisible thread she speaks of is both the subject and the method of the painting. To paint it at all is to acknowledge that it exists, that it has weight and direction, that it connects her not only to a place but to a self she has not left behind. The act of putting this on canvas is itself an act of affirmation: I am still from somewhere. That somewhere still lives in me.

Through the HERS process, Helia found in painting a language precise enough for what she needed to say. Words, she suggests, can sometimes be too direct for feelings this layered. The brush allowed her to approach the subject from the side, to suggest rather than declare, to show the thread without having to explain it. What emerged is quiet and certain at once: the portrait of a woman who has moved through the world without ever becoming rootless, and who needed paint, and space, and the invitation to be heard, to show that to anyone else.

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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