Story:

I went to Cyprus in January 2020 for a research trip connected to a festival project that ultimately never happened, because the world shut down shortly after. While I was there, I moved through both parts of the city, sketching as I went.

My way of drawing in a city is simple: I wander without a plan, and when something catches my eye, I stop and draw for a while. In Lefkoşa, this resulted in many drawings of flags, graffiti, fences, and walls. I drew the dominant features of the city, especially around its divisions. This was the first day I crossed to the Greek side. I stayed there for a couple of nights before crossing back to the Turkish side.

While standing on a street corner drawing, a man approached me and started talking. We chatted casually, and then he invited me to his bar for a drink. I probably shouldn’t have accepted a drink from a stranger on the street, but he came back with a glass of wine, told me to sit, and we had another drink.

After some time, he said that if I liked drawing, there were drawings from the 1920s in a garage nearby that he could show me. I agreed. At that point, everything about the situation sounded like it could end badly, but it didn’t. He opened the garage, and inside were beautifully drawn portraits of a woman on the wall, dating from the 1920s. We went back to the bar afterward and continued talking.

The bar was right next to the Green Line, with police patrols passing through regularly. We watched one of them go by, and then he asked if I wanted to see one more thing. By that point, I trusted the situation and said yes.

He took me to another garage with a metal door that pulls up. We went inside, and he immediately shut the door behind us. Using our phones as flashlights, he pointed to a corner where part of the wall had been removed. It appeared to be part of an old smuggling route, likely leading through the Green Line and into the Turkish side. No one explicitly said this, but it was the logical conclusion. We didn’t go far inside, but I wanted to step into the space.

I went in briefly and took a small object — a piece of pipe — because I wanted something to remember the place by. This was in 2020. I brought it back to my studio and added it to my collection of random objects. I have a rule that when I forget where an object comes from, I throw it away. This is an object I have never forgotten.

The pipe comes from the Green Line, a UN-controlled zone. Technically, entering that space was one of the most illegal things I’ve ever done; not in a dramatic sense, but in a bureaucratic, global-government sense. There was a thrill in it, not because it was dangerous, but because it involved breaking a rule that felt abstract. A kind of mundane rebelliousness: crossing borders, breaking rules that feel arbitrary, committing what could be called victimless crimes.

This feeling of intentional rule-breaking appears in my collage work as well. Some of the collages are compilations of different places, organised around the feelings I associate with them. One of those feelings is rebelliousness or something close to it.

I moved around a lot even before ending up in Istanbul. There was never really a time when I imagined staying in my hometown for my whole life, or even living near it. Going back is still possible, but it’s not very attractive to me. Small towns feel suffocating, like everyone is in your business. What I love about megacities is anonymity and being able to walk the streets and remain unknown. That anonymity brings freedom and again. A sense of rebellion.

My initial motivation for leaving the United States was educational and financial. The barrier to being an artist there is very high. You need time, money, and stability. I was never really an artist in the U.S. I left in 2016 and moved to Istanbul in 2017. Istanbul is where I truly became an artist. For me, it has always been the place.

As I’ve gotten older, my work has become more personal. I’ve been re-evaluating what it means to call myself a woman, and I’m much less attached to that label than I used to be. In the U.S., I was very engaged with the feminism of the time, but later realised that it felt rigid and rule-based, tied to judgment and prescribed behaviour. In Turkey, my experience shifted.

Rather than attaching myself to womanhood, I became more interested in dismantling gender binaries. That process felt more organic here, even if Turkish feminism itself doesn’t fully resonate with me. I don’t present as a conventional woman, and that difference is more visible in Turkey than it is in the U.S. In Istanbul, people look, assume, and read your body in ways that rarely happen in the U.S. Many people assume I’m a lesbian.

The pipe remains on my shelf — a small object carrying layers of meaning: borders, rebellion, anonymity, movement, and memory. It reminds me of a moment when curiosity overcame fear, and of the spaces, both physical and conceptual, that shape how I move through the world.

– Nora Byrne