Normally artists will dedicate their whole lives exploring the possibilities of one medium. However, Riane Pater (b.1992) refuses to commit to a single medium and work with an array of techniques such as tufting guns, video and performance or she spends her days searching for what she calls “Dutch Mountains”. We spoke with her at her studio in her house.
“Before I went to art school I studied MBO Fashion at the Noorderpoort College. After I finished there I decided that I would rather study art because it’s a broader discipline and you can do whatever you want. As an artist you get to choose what you want to do each day and the world of fashion is much more constricted in that sense. So after I graduated from my fashion degree I went on and applied for Academie Minerva and a few other art academies, sadly enough I got rejected for all of them. It was a hard blow for me but I didn’t let it bring me down so I went on and enrolled myself into the part time study of the Klassieke Academie. I surrounded myself with people that were already studying at Academy Minerva and they helped me to improve my portfolio by giving me feedback on it. The Klassieke Academie was very valuable for me because they teach you a lot of different techniques, such as painting, mixing colours, making etches and woodcuts. After one year I I redid the entrance exams and this time I was accepted by Academy Minerva and two other art schools. I chose specifically for Academy Minerva because I come from Groningen and I didn’t want to leave this town. However, to still enrich myself a bit I chose to do an exchange with New Zealand. There I discovered that the nature of my art was more Dutch than I originally had thought. Which I think is because you respond to things as an artist and the way you respond to things is dictated mostly by the rules and politics you grow up with. After finishing my Bachelor Fine Art, I went on and did the Master MADtech at the Frank Mohr Institute because it allowed me to work with a lot of new techniques. Learning such things is a source of inspiration for me and something that is always useful to me in my work.
I keep a collection of things that are rather banal such as different types of toilet paper and photographs of piles of sand. Riane Pater
The way I work is very free and is about the absurdity of life. I keep a collection of things that are rather banal such as different types of toilet paper and photographs of piles of sand, which I have dubbed as my “Dutch Mountains”. I don’t collect these things with a specific goal in mind, but I simply do these things because they fascinate me. There will be a moment that they might inspire a new work. The rugs I made for my graduation were inspired by my collection of toilet paper. The trigger for these works came during the holidays when I found a tufting gun online, which is a power tool that you can use to make rugs. I had never seen anything like it and I solely bought it because I was curious. Something like this feeds the child inside of me that always wants to keep on exploring. Limiting myself to a single medium would bore me. You shouldn’t want to limit yourself like that.
I try to put everything into a new unexpected perspective. I always respond to my direct environment and I like to play with materials. An example would be a performance I did in which I was mopping water on a frozen lake. This performance was a snapshot of my environment and a direct response to the situation. The performance becomes absurd by the unexpected combination of two very banal things; everyone knows what ice is and everyone owns a mop. But the combination of the two is like a short circuiting in the head and the unexpectedness of it makes people laugh. Despite the fact that the performance has no purpose, as an artist you still create something anyway, which is a very strange given. Doing nothing yet creating something. Being an artist is a very paradoxal thing when it comes to that.”