An artist from one of the coldest places on Earth finds her dreamy creativity is the perfect fit for the ‘easy-going’ life of Cyprus

What can you say about a seven-ton, six-metre ice sculpture in the middle of the Egyptian desert? The answer is ‘Nothing’, or at least it doesn’t matter. The image is so outrageous – seven tons of ice, plonked amid burning-hot sand – it requires no context, no explanation. The story writes itself.

That said, it’s still a bit surprising to meet Elena Tengri, the 27-year-old Siberian artist behind ‘Ashes of the Cold’, the title of the aforementioned artwork. You’d expect the author of such a grand gesture to be authoritative, maybe a bit flamboyant – but Elena is modest and jovial, and immensely good-natured.

We meet at Pieto in old Nicosia, a cosy place full of cushions and knick-knacks; she’s visibly delighted. Interior design is one of her passions, though she’s currently – following a rather circuitous route – studying Animation at Cyprus Academy of Art in Limassol. It’s also an unseasonably warm day, 30 degrees in late October – and that too is relevant, ‘Ashes’ being explicitly a work about climate change.

Making the sculpture, and surrounding it with searing desert heat, was only half the project. The other half – and all that remains, now that it’s over – was watching (and filming) it melt, a process that took about 60 hours: “A stark reminder that the cold we once considered eternal can vanish almost instantly under the pressure of heat”, as it says on Elena’s website.

The topic hits her in quite a particular way since she comes from the Republic of Sakha (also known as Yakutia), one of the world’s coldest places – a vast tract of wilderness with a population of about one million (about the same as Cyprus