Thea Djordjadze

I was drawn to Thea Djordjadze’s work initially because of the similarities I saw between her use of steel and my own. Their stance appears important, making for precarious balancing acts and supports with leg-like lines. The material presence of her works too, quiet but significant, encountering each other and activating the space that surrounds them. I then discovered that her way of working was almost the same as my own ‘the artworks are not delivered in their final form; instead, materials and components arrive, at which point individual works or exhibitions as installations are created on-site.’ (Berliner Festspiele, Q&A, 2021) and I found this to be interesting, because perhaps there is more to this way of working, the approach, that lends the work a particular look? Is this perhaps where some of the idea of being in motion, or transition, states of becoming partly comes from?

I find the way in which she blurs the ‘lines...between support and display object and environment’ (Art It, 2011: Part II) very interesting and she is another example of an artist who ‘employs material[s] to promote oppositions in perception’ (Berliner Festspiele, Q&A, 2021). By making numerous variations of similar objects, she builds her own language through these forms; taking voids and making them solid, making chairs that aren’t chairs, plinths that are also sculptures, it builds up a series of material expressions. 

There is a sensibility to the works which extends beyond the visual, ‘Djordjadze’s practice circles around art as a physical, atmospheric experience developed over time with transient elements and the visual. Another aspect of movement lies hidden: to see what the artist sees; to experience – through one’s own movement in the space – what she experiences. Rays of sunlight, the weather, the seasons: visual elements that change how material glistens and shadows are cast.’ (Berliner Festspiele, Q&A, 2021) This demonstrates the various layers that build up and become interconnected when you work in this way, ‘shaping material in relation to space’ (Berliner Festspiele, 2021) is a shifted mode of experience, it is a space of activation – it is active. It is less to do with just viewing/looking at the work and more about moving through. Djordjadze states ‘I don’t think I’m doing forms. I am working with movements. I work with materiality or energy’ (Art It, 2011: Part II) and this is a notion that excites me so much, as this circulates the territory I am struggling to define in my own practice, what is it that I am dealing with, I think it is the same things; movements, materiality, energy - ‘sometimes I see something familiar that resonates with my sensibility, and then I am overcome by this urgency to use it for myself’ (Art It, 2011: Part II).

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The following quote continues to expand upon this, and I am glad I am not alone in my difficulty to verbalise this space I am trying to move into. But it becomes about navigating this space that you inhabit, so by extension it becomes about how you move (and that is where the notion of the body enters)