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The Garden of Faceless Spirits
Embedded within my ancestral home and garden in Neapolis, Nicosia, is an ecosystem of lingering spirit women. The Garden of Faceless Spirits is a visual mapping of this matriarchal ecosystem, an exploration of the transient qualities of a multi-generational landscape in the context of Cyprus. My ancestral home in Neapolis lies just outside the Venetian Walls of Nicosia and was built in the 1930s when Cyprus was under British sovereignty. Neapolis was an inter-communally inhabited neighbourhood, with Cypriots from multiple communities (Greek-speaking, Turkish-speaking, Armenian and Maronite) living side by side; now renamed Yenisehir and inhabited mainly by settlers, my ancestral home is one of the last Cypriot homes left on its street.
The Garden of Faceless Spirits is an illustrative contribution to the earth-body art genre that Ana Mendieta pioneered. In this art form, the distinctions between the self-body/the ancestral-body and the body/the land are challenged, reflected in my work through the mapping of my period blood over pressed leaves. As the light of the lightbox on which the piece is displayed shifts across colours and brightness, there are fluctuations in what is revealed and what is concealed.
Underneath Neapolis is an undercurrent of feminine spirits. My Cypriot grandmother was a seamstress; her translucent body is embedded within her woven creations across the house that was once hers. In The Garden of Faceless Spirits, the spirit women are painted in imitation of Cypriot embroidery motifs, alluding to an art form that was once a form of secret communication between women resisting patriarchy. The “facelessness” of the spirit-women refers to their eco-spiritual nature - they are not physical presences but instead exist within a spirit-ecosystem mapped out beneath the landscape of Neapolis.
- Ayshe-Mira Yashin is a visual artist and tarot reader studying Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts. Her practice involves illustrative forms of earth-body art, including linework, printmaking, artist books, and multimedia collages with textiles, pressed leaves, and menstrual blood. She created the Earth Mother Magic Tarot, a risograph printed tarot deck based on lesbian embodiments of the Earth through anticolonial lenses of ecofeminism. Her practice includes providing tarot readings with her deck in women’s and/or queer spaces, illustrating stories based on matriarchal and goddess-centred mythologies, as well as creating murals for social movement spaces. Her art has been exhibited in the Courtauldian’s “Tongue in Trees” at the IMT Gallery with Naturally Not Binary and “Manifestations” at NIMAC.