Gift to Irma

Gift to Irma

Elene Chantladze

A selection of works Elene Chantladze gifted to her daughter Irma, accompanied by a text by Miciah Hussey, Stories in Stones: The Art of Elene Chantladze.

What animates Chantladze’s drawings and paintings, as Hussey’s accompanying text describes, is the combination of her unconventional choice of media, her elliptical approach to subject and composition, and the meaning she manages to wrest from the poorest of materials. Drawing on psychoanalytical and critical theory, Hussey’s text is at heart situated around a personal encounter with the artist and her work, and for this new book serves as much as companion as interpreter: a witness, alongside the reader, to a lexicon that is entirely Chantladze’s own.

‘Born by the sea in Supsa, Georgia, a town named after the river running by her home, Elene Chantladze gathered stones, wrote stories and plays, kept diaries, and read voraciously from a young age. Many of her writings were included in “friends’ books,” anthologies issued by the local Writer’s Union, and recently have been published in their own volumes. For much of her life, she has lived in Tskaltubo, working in the area’s various sanatoriums and diagnostic centers to support her family. She persevered within the repressive atmosphere of Soviet occupation, seizure of Georgian lands, wars with Russia, and its continued looming threat over her homeland. It was amid this strife that she would discover the means to create her work. At her jobs, she would collect the empty chocolate boxes discarded by doctors, the old calendar pages the nurses gave her, or any thrown-out items with surfaces suitable to make drawings and paintings.’ —Miciah Hussey

Editor: Nina Akhvlediani, Lisa Offermann, Dan Solbach

Text: Miciah Hussey

Design: Timur Akhmetov

Language: EN / GE

Publisher: Posta Press, Tbilisi and Kona Books, Tbilisi