About

From dog-hair sweaters to neighbourhood-sheds, ideas are everywhere.

My interest in father’s flower arranging made me fearless.
Rikke’s passion for fashion goes back to primary school. It was almost a necessity to make her own clothes – Rikke could not find what she wanted. Since most of the Ruhwald budget went on shoes, Rikke had to be resourceful in her choice of materials; she once got a rash from a sweater so itchy that she had knitted out of kamyarn, which is used for carpet weaving. So, Rikke’s mother knitted her a much softer one, made out of the yarn from their dog’s hair.

 

 

If you are a designer, you need to know how to smell gold.
It wasn’t easy for Rikke to follow her heart; to her mind, architecture was a more acceptable profession. But Rikke admits to being taken by the moment, having a strong intuitive feeling for societal trends, sensing that being a designer is something you cannot learn.

 

 

You can be pushed to explore your talent and your technique and understand your own universe.
In 1995, Rikke travelled to London to study at Central St Martins College of Art & Design. Upon reflection Rikke admits that her skill in finding harmony in abstract shapes has been crucial for all her jobs in Paris, comparing herself to a mad scientist with frills and patches.

 

 

Home couture.
In 2007, after a decade in Paris designing for Castelbajac, Martine Sitbon, Lacroix and Sonia Rykiel, Rikke moved back to Copenhagen, a city that moves at a more leisurely pace. She had a son and began to spend most of her time in the home. So she began to suspend things, making them look weightless, combining them to interact and create rhythm from within. At first, Rikke used scraps in metal, stone, wood and glass mostly found in the neighbourhood waste – and so there were mobiles; ironic and playful, a strange combination of phallic shapes and Scandinavian design.

 

 

Wonderful negative shapes inspire me to compositions.
It became clearer when Rikke found a container full of metal sheets, with cutout holes, from capsule production. They worked amazingly; suspended in strange balls with light inside, they threw shadows like dappled light through leaves. Working with the cut-offs inspired Rikke to contact the iconic Danish lamp producers and propose to use their waste for the creation of lamps. In the period 2007- 2012 she obtained materials from producers of iconic furniture LEKLINT, FRITZ HANSEN and LOUIS POULSEN where she made mobiles, lamps and collages from the cut-offs.

 

 

Ricardo of Denmark                                                                                                                                              Fashion was still hard to abandon and Rikke has tried out the professional life of being a fashion designer in Copenhagen: The hands on pleasures from the Paris ateliers were outsourced to less costly locations and manpower, and as the millennium progress, fashion has become fast and very damaging to the planet. Rikke and her colleagues were unwrapping thousands of plastic bags to free the collection when it arrived from far away production places. The look of the plastic bags filled with empty plastic bags fed Rikke with inspiration and she is now working with the immense amounts of waste coming from fashion. Some call it up-cycling, Rikke is happy working with waste material in infinite amount, the mad professor is back.

 

Making a lamp for me is just like making a dress.
The material decides many things; this makes it easier to focus on the shape. The lamps are surely just a stop along the way, what remains constant for Rikke is the love of finding the balance in the unbalanced.