Helen: Do you want to introduce yourself first?
Sophia: My name is Sophia Tabatadze. I’ve lived in Berlin since 2008. I grew up in Georgia, went to Amsterdam to study when I was 20, and came to Germany when I was 30.
Helen: Shall we start with you telling me where we are?
Sophia: Sure, we are in a gallery where I am showing 366 drawings that I did every day in the year 2024. There are 240 drawings hanging on the walls and the rest are also here in the albums. It is the first time that I show all of them together and I am getting the sense what their volume is. These 366 drawings are part of the show Reveries of Solitary Muse curated by Alexia Tillmermans at Haverkampg Leisteschneider Gallery in Berlin.
Helen: So what inspired you to do one drawing a day for all of 2024?
Sophia: I will tell you first what stopped me, as I had a very long break and had not really drawn for 20 years until I started these daily drawings.
Helen: OK.
Sophia: I guess what stopped me is that in the contemporary art world to which I belong and where I want to belong, one always must have a certain framework in order to verbalise one's work when participating in shows, applying for programs or residencies or grants.
Drawing for me is the medium that is the most connected to flow. So when I’m drawing I usually don’t really know what’s coming out of it. And this makes it very hard for me to talk about them. To avoid this, I shifted to other mediums: installations, performances, and films. If I build say an installation, I know the theme, I have a plan, and then I produce the work. Something surprising might happen there as well and it might take a different turn, but still I kind of am in control. And with drawings, I never have the feeling of being in control. Some are absolutely my work. I look at them and think, oh, wow, this is really my signature. But even those are somehow so independent that I know I made them, but I also can’t take authorship. Sometimes they’re there for themselves. It’s not like these are my creations. Sometimes I’m like, oh yeah, it’s a nice drawing, as if it’s not even mine. I know I made them, but I don’t have necessarily this feeling of, yeah, this is my artwork. It’s more like they exist now.
Helen: So not a feeling of ownership. But it’s because it’s an intuitive thing it just flows out of you and then it exists. It manifests itself as its own object.
Sophia: Someone else called them not drawings but manifestations. And I really liked it because they manifest themselves out of nothing.
I took a very long break from drawing. My artistic juices were a little bit used up. I did other things. It wasn’t that I stopped making art but I wasn’t drawing and it was emotionally hard to come back to. Drawing is where I feel the most alive, so I needed something playful and not too serious to pick it up again. So, when a Polish artist and a friend, Patrycja Rozwora, asked me to curate a show with her daily drawings at the end of 2023, I knew right away that I would start from January and make one drawing a day.
Helen: Do you want to talk a little bit about why drawing is your favourite medium?
Sophia: I started drawing around the age of 12 or 13. I was born in Soviet Georgia and every Soviet young person, especially girls, for some reason were learning to play piano. Many of us went to state music schools for the piano lessons and I have these memories of not really being able to practice as it bored me to play for long hours. At the same time, it was super easy to draw without being aware of the time. I remember sitting in the living room and my mom doing some ironing and the television on and I really just drew my time away.
Even now, when people ask me how long it takes to make an individual drawing, I can never answer as time passes differently when I draw.
Helen: In a way these drawings remind me of the practice in writing called Morning Pages. Although the results of Morning Pages are rarely beautiful. You get up in the morning and you write by hand three pages until you’re done and see what comes out. It’s sort of to get rid of the clutter, so that you can write other things. But it’s also very different because what you make is beautiful whereas morning pages are not necessarily.
Sophia: More than morning pages, I thought of them in the beginning as playing piano scales. You don’t play some specific piece; you warm up and exercise your hand. They don't have to be beautiful; they are what they are. I was drawing for the sake of drawing, to get in shape again. Also, the fact that they’re all A4 format helped me. I could make them anywhere. I drew when I was traveling and in my living room, when there was no time to go to the studio.
Helen: My first drafts are always terrible and they always require multiple revisions. Were you tempted to go back and revise your drawings?
Sophia: The only rule was to make one drawing per day and sometimes I would make more when I enjoyed the process. When I thought something was missing, I could always add to a drawing. But now they’re all photographed, and I will keep them how they are. What I can still change now is whether to show them horizontally or vertically.
Helen: So now tell me what inspired you, I guess different things that you experienced during the year, right?
Sophia: Somewhere in July I drew one piece on which the text reads: "If reality gets boring go back to abstraction and if abstraction gets boring go back to reality." This drawing made me understand what I was doing. So, the abstract ones were following the flow without any plan, and reality depicted something that I saw or remembered. Depicting reality had to happen in the morning as I needed a certain focus to make them look how they were in my head or in a photo and the imaginative ones could be done anytime during the day or night.
Helen: What other patterns came up?
Sophia: I started with an ink pen and till April I did not add any colour to them. Ink drawing is something that I feel I know best. I am a fluent speaker in it, so to say. Then later I added colors and other elements. So, these first ones I call line drawings.
Then there are these that I call graphic geographies, in which I depict something I saw and liked because of its graphical qualities. The stairs with water stains on them, asphalt with dark shapes of tar. The wooden interior of a concert hall in Berlin. An object of desire was a chewing gum set I saw as a kid in the Soviet Union. Chewing gum was much, much more expensive than bread.
I also depicted some strong emotional impressions like visiting my cousin in prison in Georgia: the waiting room, the list of things that one can or cannot take the prisoners.
While making some drawings I went down memory lane and remembered the time when I used to draw as a young girl, with my mom at home, me sitting in the living room, the TV on.
My father also came up with the magic objects that he would make for me with his hands when I was little: a small theatre stage and a wooden desk for macramé making.
Then there are some mandala-like shapes. These I usually made when I had no idea how to start, and it would help me to go into a circular kind of movement and repetition and something would get manifested.
Some come from mental images during meditation practice, like me sitting in my living room in Berlin with the feeling my feet are in water or my right hand has a magic touch.
Then there is a whole series of hands. When I have friends over, it is a way of interacting with them to ask if I can draw their palms and I see that also in a way as geography. The later ones were more abstract. I really concentrated on the lines, almost like reading the future on the palm. So, I was getting rid of the shape or the idea that you can recognise the hand, but more into these lines because they’re also very graphical and geographical.
Then there are some objects that surround me daily, bread slices I make every morning for my son or a pan with boiling eggs.
Helen: Some also reflect politics in Georgia, right?
Sophia: Yes, from May 2024, the first protests started against what we call the Russian Law. The Russian Law is the foreign agent’s law – people and organisations receiving foreign grants, usually from the EU or the US, must register themselves as foreign agents. And during that time, large protests started in Georgia. This was very much the beginning of it, and we thought there was still a lot to fight for. But now it’s kind of clear that, by that time, many things were already lost. We thought we still had some air to breathe, but it seems we don’t have any left and are suffocating. I was following the news and there was this image of a bus protecting people from the police. So that was kind of a heroic deed by the bus driver. And the oligarch who is running Georgia like a king is sitting and thinks that these demonstrators disturb his morning coffee.
Then, there are several from October when the elections were rigged. Also, with the hands of someone marking the ballots. On the next day after Georgia’s rigged elections, I was very down, walking in rainy Berlin and I saw this homeless guy with Che Guevara on his t-shirt with the text: people liberate themselves. I asked him if I could photograph him because I was like, yeah, this was really my mood. You still want to fight but you don’t really know how.
At the very end, in December. I thought there are some that I almost can call my handwriting. I think it’s a combination of ink, lines, and some kind of mess and order at the same time. Kind of a self-portrait. I really see myself in some more than in others.
Helen: I see you in the ink drawings a lot. Not just because I followed them on social media for a year, but also, they resemble the walls of your apartment and even your film in some ways. The lines are somehow similar. There’s a certain absurdity and whimsy that’s still very precise.
I keep looking at the one with the chess board.
Sophia: These are my parents before my birth. I know this story from my mother One was 21 and the other 22 when they married. They liked to play chess, and when someone visited them, they would hide the chess board. I thought it’s so funny like chess was for them an intimate thing that they didn’t want to share with the world.
Helen: It also has chess pieces like furniture.
Sophia: Yes, that's because I know that their home was never really tidied up, and then I thought of the chess figures thrown around all over in a messy way.
Helen: So, how did doing this change you? As a person, as an artist? If those are separate things. I don’t know.
Sophia: While I was drawing every day, the works were becoming more complex and then I started drawing larger ones in my studio. I came back not only to the drawing practice but to the joy of creating as well.
This kind of joy is what my body feels only in the process of drawing. And I missed it. And now again I sit and I’m really, really enjoying the process and as I do it time disappears again. And it also opened me up in a way that I want to be back again in the art world. I used to have lots of exhibitions and stuff and then I stopped for a very long time because I was not invited. But I was also not inviting myself.
Helen: Wow. That’s really inspirational.
Sophia: When I started with daily drawings the time was right. I was ready again. My son was a bit older; several components had to come together and then this daily practice really pushed me forward.
But it is inspirational because I remember talking to you a few years ago and we both felt stuck then. But you never know. You think your life is a constant, right? Foreigners living in Berlin, in Germany, and always being on the outside, you think you’re stuck in that status. That’s why it’s inspirational.
Sophia: I understand I just don’t want to give the impression…
Helen: Yeah, “I can solve your problem.” And then we create an Instagram…
Sophia: “If you draw every day, your life will open up…”
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Helen: So, do you sell the drawings?
Sophia: Yes, they’re 350 euros each.
And there is a model for lending them as well since I want them to be spread throughout the world. One can pay 150 euros and borrow five drawings for one year. The borrower can then try to sell them from their homes.
