The necessary expression Verschenen in Klei, mei 2005 by Yba van der Meulen Beatrijs van Rheeden’s work shows a transition from closed towards open forms. She sees this as a reflection of her inner life: a necessary expression of her self.Beatrijs van Rheeden (Groningen 1965) studied at the artacademy Minerva in Groningen, first at the teachertrainingcourse drawing, but after one year she decided that she rather work in the three dimensional, changed to the teachertrainingcourse crafts, to start work with ceramics. Unfortunately this department was on its way to close down, and the last year of her studies she worked at the artacademy Constantijn Huygens in Kampen in the department of monumental ceramics. She continued her studies for one and a half year in Hungary, at the academy of Applied Arts in Budapest, for a masters in ceramics. Since then Beatrijs works as a selfemployed artist and she teaches ceramics at an artschool. Closed forms For a long time she made rather closed sculptures. Abstract work, obviously inspired by architecture, made of stoneware clay and usually –in somber colouring-  sprayed with engobes or glazes. Her first body of works was called ‘stackings’, elements made out of slabs of clay, that could be stacked in different ways. After that came the towers and stairways, temples and mountains. Looking back she comments about this work:” It fits with the way I was then. I was very closed and I didn’t know myself very well”. Beatrijs tells that she was confronted with herself in many ways in 1995. In her work she was continuing with variations, she was stuck. Followed a long period of an inner struggle and self-contemplation, from which she emerged stronger and more open. This would also show very dramatically in her work. With the series ‘signs’ and ‘curls’ Beatrijs switches technique: pinching up instead of building with slabs. ‘Pinching seems to be more my kind of thing, I can do this endlessly, and have more freedom this way’. Still the forms remained closed. In 1997 during a symposium in the ceramics studio in Kecskemet,Hungary she tried some things with porcelain for the very first time. But after this she still continued with her ‘curls’ for a while. Beatrijs did not realise the potential that porcelain held for her. The series ‘curls’ can be seen as transitional, however. In 1999 she finally turned to porcelain, and the material caused the change. Suddenly her work was very open in character, the vulnerable inside was there for all to see, its fragility stressed by the fragility of the material itself. Order and coincidence People will see all kinds of things in her work; organic structures, shells, fossiles. This does not bother her, though she still names architecture as her source of inspiration. ‘For me they are just form. It is a play of lines and rithme. How will I put down these lines, how will I play with the rithme of the filaments. What I am thinking about is, order, rithme and the laws of nature. The coincidence is where it ends. ‘I am playing with the balance between order and chaos’. In her new body of work, the serie ‘Fusion’, she gives even more room to coincidence.By firing at very high temperatures she lets the material ‘sit down’ a little. Up front Beatrijs knows what she wants to make in a round and about way. She works with little rolls of porcelain that she pinches upwards as thin as she can. This causes the patchy way the wall willl look, she calls it ‘vlokkerig’ ( I suppose ‘woolly’ fits). In the series ‘Fusion’ she deliberately lets the forms deform in the kiln, but she still controls this deformation. The way the forms are built by hand, very regularly and always in the same direction, she can predict up to a point, how the form will react. Her new work seems a new period for her. The openness and vulnerability that were first shown on the inside, are now transferred to the outside, to these walls that have been deformed. She sees this also as an expression of her own life. ‘of course people will see what they are sensitive to, and it is always a translation, but that is the beauty of this job. The work is an expression of oneself. Even though the work is abstract and one does not consciously do this. Art is a necessary expression of yourself, or else it becomes empty. This has to do with integrity. Back