"With my works I explore how we shape and are shaped by our surroundings, so the objects that surround us in everyday life play an important role. I am interested in the stories behind those objects, their evolution, and the associations that come with them."

Our interview with Rike Droescher discusses their process and thoughts behind their work.
Interview by Richard Starbuck.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?

I grew up in a big family in Tübingen, a university town, in the South of Germany. It is a midsize town surrounded by forests and mountains. Most of my weekends and holidays I spent with the Pfadfinder, the German version of the scouts. It was a parallel world where we lived off the grid and close to nature. Sometimes it was a bit confusing to go back to my normal life, leaving the camp fires and adventures behind. I think it is also where I first learned how to build things, improvise and pay attention to the surrounding environment.

I studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Akademie der Bildende Künste in Munich with a main focus on sculpture. I never planned on studying art and developed an interest for it quite late. It came through my fashion design studies in Bielefeld and my explorations of the connections between material, form and the human body. While the range of materials and forms expanded, these early explorations with textile still inform my approach to sculpture today.

Your sculptures give off a strong sense of memory, almost like they are remnants from another time. How do you capture this feeling in your pieces, and what importance do these reflections of the past have for you?

During my studies at the Kunstakademie my class made a trip to see cave paintings in France. The paintings and the variety of cave architectures themselves, from very narrow corridors to gigantic cathedrals, are absolutely stunning. When walking into these wombs/tombs of history something hits you right in the guts. It is this kind of physical experience that touches your humanity; and you walk outside with the feeling you might have caught a fleeting glimpse of the core.

This experience unlocked a general interest in human origin, the mystery and the speculations, ancient technologies as well as the stories humans invented to patch the gaps in the unknown. I am currently focusing on the ideas of a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature that I often imagine when thinking about the lives of early humans. I like to call them distant memories and channel through them many of my own emotions in response to our relationship with nature today. They bring romantic, sometimes sentimental as well as very raw notions into my works and find a form in some sort of allegories of grief, ambivalence and longing.

Your sculptures feature intriguing combinations of organic and geometric forms, such as the green crossed rods and the apple compass. What drives your choice of materials and shapes, and how do you intend these elements to interact with one another in your work?

I like to work with materials and surfaces that have tactile qualities. I see them as an entrance to the archive of touch everyone carries within themselves and might invite a physical or even emotional approach to my works. Often I choose materials rooted in a primal relationship with the earth such as sand, wood, wax and currently mostly clay. The two works you are talking about, however, are bronze casts from lost-wax technique and covered by the imprints of my fingers. I played the trombone for several years. In the beginning the instrument was always cold and seemed dead, you had to revive it with your breath. The finger imprints are doing much the same, giving some warmth to the metal.

Thinking about the combination of organic and geometric forms in my work, it is more the sand carpets with their geometrical patterns, that come to my head. In these works I lend this fleeting material, sand, a distinct form for a short period of time. Sometimes I think of them as picnic blankets, which offer you temporarily a place of refuge, before you pack them up and go back home.

Another example are the wooden hands, which I often show in direct connection to organic shapes from the natural world, like flowers or the tiny tree. They are composed of many single, geometric pieces. The grid-like sections these pieces create, stem from the aesthetics of protection gear and devices. An affinity for protection gear started with my early sculptures. When I got overwhelmed at one point by the flexibility of fabric and the endless possibilities in how to drape it, the engagement with hard shells from protection gear, was one way to find more decisive forms and to invite a new context.

Since then, the friction as well as balance, that comes with the combination of organic and geometrical forms became a continuous point of reference .

Your work often includes familiar objects presented in unexpected ways, like the house-shaped structure and the suspended hands with fruits. What message or theme are you exploring through these reimagined everyday items, and how do you see them resonating with the audience?

Variations of walls and houses and especially the human hand are recurring motifs in my work. I see them as metaphors and substitutes, that both build a bridge and appear as thresholds between the human body and the environment. They are membrane, memory box, and tools to experience the world.  

With my works I explore how we shape and are shaped by our surroundings, so the objects that surround us in everyday life play an important role. I am interested in the stories behind those objects, their evolution, and the associations that come with them. Often the objects I choose, like the motif of the apple, have accompanied human beings for a long time and became ingrained in tales and mythologies. The tension between the ordinary and the mystical, the familiar and the elusive permeates through them and I include this state of ambiguity in my own sculptures. 

An important part of my practice, is to think about how my works come together in a space. Fragments of natural and domestic landscapes, as well as the human body merge into one another with the intention to distort conventional notions of inside and outside, separation and interdependence, protection and exposure — emphasizing vulnerability, decay and regeneration.

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?

I work in a retired commercial painters workshop. It is located in a quiet neighbourhood in the outskirts of Düsseldorf, surrounded by an ocean of brick buildings and a garden. Since the inside is quite packed with finished and unfinished works and material, I learned to love working outside under a large roof.

Most of my works come into existence through a physical thinking-through-making style of work. I am not using a lot of heavy machines, so my main tool are my hands and something I would call a body memory.

Even though I often work with familiar shapes, I don’t use ready-mades or found objects. It is important to me to create my own material, starting from scratch. Through the transformation or re-creation of a familiar object, it becomes a representative and more open to symbolic meaning or new context.

While I do have a penchant for precision, I don’t want it to take over my work. That’s why I eschew plans and production drawings, and put a lot of trust in my improvisation skills.

I work in phases, starting with a phase in which I solely focus on the production of all the things that float in my head. When I get them out of my system, I take these objects and start to work on different combinations and scenarios. I see many of them as fragments, bits and pieces, which become material again and again. Mostly it is within the preparation for a specific space that they enter into a dialogue with one another and find their final form.

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

It was fantastic to see the works of Magali Reus for the first time in Brussels a few weeks ago. Her jam jar sculptures are amazing. Seeing them shown as a group, they all become their own characters and you can get lost in every single one them.

All those compressed layers of details and techniques, colour and material combinations unfold the hyper-condensation of vast streams of thoughts, the complex systems of space and physical experience that she imbues within the single object.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I am looking very much forward to showing works in a group exhibition at Alice Amati Gallery in London in July. The exhibition brings together works that explore ways to capture the transience of the world we inhabit, fleeting encounters that have the ability to shape our understanding of self and the complex relationship between human emotions and our surroundings.

Also I just started to prepare new works for a solo exhibition for Spazio Display in Parma in September. I love the very concentrated shows they do and I am very excited to show there myself. 

Artist’s Website

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Alice Amati Gallery

All images courtesy of the artist and Alice Amati Gallery
Interview publish date: 04/07/2024