Let us introduce Mme Stella Georgieva – artist, designer and creative mind.
Stella Georgieva is one of the few artists in EU who keep on creating unique works from leather. She graduated the ceramic art school and got a master degree at the National Art Academy, Sofia. “For me, leather is very valuable material and I wanted to give it another, higher artistic value. In the meantime, I decided to combine leather and ceramics, as they both emit a lot of heat”. Stella is mastering her own authoring technology applying a very laborious leather processing with products taken from the nature. Her artistic view, her talent and vast experience allow Stella to work virtuously with the materials and to achieve an incredible expression and harmony in combining ceramic and leather: She is playing with the plasticity of these two living materials breathing into them flexibility and grace. Her earlier works from the first half of the 80ies combine metal and blank leather. She participated with these panels in many exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad – Chicago, Berlin, Prague – “A memory of the summer “,” Winter Sun “,” Composition I ” (go to our gallery to have a look). In them, Stella combines the two materials by setting the elasticity and softness of the one in contrast with the hardness and shine of the other. From the very moment she started working with leather, Stella has established herself as a leading artist at the Centre for Models of the Creative Fund of the Union of Bulgarian Artists. Alone and in a team with other artists, she produced unique gifts for high-ranking guests as well as for the visit of delegations to Pope John Paul II in The Vatican. She is among the artists who created the leather body of the Golden Book of the Historical Museum, the American University’s Book of Honour, the book of impressions of the Aprilov High School in Gabrovo and so on. Since 1989, she has worked mostly with ceramics and leather, and, depending on how the skin has been processed, she combines ceramic sculpture with blank leather, parchment or russian goat leather (so called „iuft“). Initially, she created elegant ceramic vessels with colour contrast – white ceramics and darker-coloured leather with ornaments from the cover pages of the London Four Gospel. “I was impressed by a series of motifs from the London Four Gospel. It was about the spellbinding and protective features that these tracery had at the time. We have forgotten about them today. Their ornaments and their colours look very good on the leather and bring a deep protective meaning as well. I wanted not only to use them, but also to popularize them. “
The art of Stella Georgieva captivates with the expressiveness and grace of the forms. It’s like a tale you want to listen to for a long time, a tale with a happy ending.