366 drawings by Sophia Tabatadze

Helen Faller interviews Sophia Tabatadze

Helen: Do you want to introduce yourself first?

Sophia: My name is Sophia Tabatadze. I live in Berlin since 2008. I grew up in Georgia, went to study in Amsterdam when I was 20, and then I came to Germany when I was 30.

Helen: Shall we start by you telling me where we are?

Sophia: Sure, we are in gallery where I am showing 366 drawings that I did every day in the year 2023. 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 them all together and am getting the sense what their volume is. These 366 drawings are part of the show Reveries of Solitary Muse curated by Alexia Timmermans at Haverkampf Leisteschneider gallery in Berlin.

Helen: So what inspired you to do this one drawing a day for all of 2024?

Sophia: I think I will tell you first what stopped me as had a very long break and have not really drawn for 20 years till I started these daily drawings.

I guess what stopped me is that within the contemporary art world where I belong and where I want to belong, one always must have a certain framework to be able to verbalize ones works when participating into shows, applying for some programs, residencies or grants.

But drawing for me is the medium that is the most connected to flow. When I start a drawing, I usually don’t really know what the result will be, and this makes it very hard for me to talk about it. To avoid this, I shifted to other mediums, for example, if I build 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’m never really in control.

But I always knew that drawing is something where I feel the most alive, so I needed something playful and not too serious to go back (or to go forward) to it again. So, when a Polish artist and a friend Patrycja Rozwora, asked me to curate the show with her daily drawings at the end of 2023 and I knew right away I had to start from January with making one drawing a day.

Helen: Do you want to talk a little bit about why drawing is your most preferred medium?

Sophia: I started drawing around the age of 12-13. I was born in Soviet Georgia and every Soviet young person, especially girls, for some reason had to learn how to play piano. We all had like seven years of the piano lessons at state music schools, and I have these memories of not really being able to exercise 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, I really was drawing my time away.

Even now, when people, ask me how long it takes to make individual drawing, I can never answer as the 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 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: To bring up the music analogue again 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 did not have to be beautiful. I was drawing for the sake of doing it, to get into shape again. Also, the fact that they’re all A4 format, also helped me, I did it everywhere. I did it when I was traveling and when there was no time to go to studio. I was not asking them to perform or become something. They were what they were.

Helen: Interesting. My first drafts are always terrible, and they always require multiple revisions. Were you tempted to go back and revise your drawings?

Sophia: I did not have a very strict rule about it as it did not matter so much. The only rule was to make one drawing 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 still change now it weather 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?

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 have seen or remembered. Depicting the reality had to happen in the morning as I needed certain focus to make them look how they were in my head or photograph, and the imaginative ones could be done anytime during the day or night.

Helen: What other patterns came up?

I started with ink pen and till April I did not add any color to them, ink drawing is something that I feel I know best. This is the medium that I am a fluent speaker in. 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 that I saw and liked because of its graphical qualities. The stairs with water stains on, asphalt with dark shapes of Tar. Wooden interior of a concert hall in Berlin.

I also I 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 for the prisoners (add image of prison drawings)

While making some I go down the 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, TV on.

My father also came up, with the magic objects that he would make for me with his hands when I was little like a small theatre stage and wooden desk for macramé making.

Then there are some mandala-like shapes, these I usually did when I had no idea how to start, and it would help me to go into the circular kind of movement and repetition and something would get manifested. So when a collogue referred to them manifestations, I thought he was right.

Some come from the mental images during meditation practice, like me sitting in my living room in berlin with feet in the water, or my hand having a magical touch.

Then there is a whole series of hands, when I have some friends coming over, it is a way of interaction with them to ask them if I can draw their palms and I see that also in a way as geography. The more abstract I go with the hands the more I like them, in some you can hardly recognize that they are lines on someone’s palm.

Then there are some objects that surround me daily, bread slices that I make every morning for my son or a cooking pen with boiling eggs.

Helen: Some reflect politics in Georgia, right?

Sophia: Yes from May 2024, the first protests started against what we call Russian law. The Russian law is the foreign agent’s law - people and organizations who received foreign grants, usually from EU and USA should register themselves as foreign agents. And during that time large protest 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 then many things were already lost. We thought we still have some air to breathe, but it seems don’t have any left and are suffocating. I was following the news and there was this image of a bus bus blocking people away from the police. So that was kind of a heroic deed from the bus driver. And the oligarch, who is running Georgia like a king is sitting with his coffee and thinks that these people disturb his morning coffee.

Then there are several from October when elections were rigged. Also, with hands of someone marking the ballots. And on the next day of Georgian rigged elections, I was very down, walking in the rainy Berlin and I saw this homeless guy, with Che Guevara on the T-shirt with the text: people liberate themselves. And I thought he was also like us, still wants to fight but does not know how.

Helen: I keep looking at the one with chess.

Sophia: These are my parents. And I know this story from my mother, it is before my birth. One was 21 and the other was 22, newly married. When they were home alone the liked to play chess, and when someone vested 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 tided up, and then I thought of the chess figures thrown around all over in 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: As I was drawing every day, they 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 as well. In the years when I did not draw, I had a feeling that the more professional I was becoming artistically, the less playful my works were and then I got stuck, I couldn’t work, I lost the urgency or the joy to create.

But I guess I need this flow for my artwork. As I mentioned earlier, I started making other kind of works, which was easier to talk about and to explain. But exactly because of that, they also lost their urgency. It ate itself.

I struggled for several years, and what these drawings brought back or how they changed me is that they brought this joy back. This kind of process connected joy is what my body feels with drawing only, even though I have worked in different mediums, from film-making to installations to performances. 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. It’s amazing. 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. And several components had to come together and then this daily practice really helped.

Helen: You can’t realize things before it’s time for you to realize them.