rika haasbroek

A banker-turned-ceramicist, Rika has been honing her skills in hand-building over the past six years since taking a creative sabbatical from corporate. Her parallel involvemet in Originally a banker and branch manager, she has always been drawn to the creative side and designed several installations in a time when promotions and visual merchandising in a banking hall and Homemakers shows were unheard of. Later, she pursued a career in Interior Design and Visual Merchandising and was awarded several accolades in this field. Although she dabbled in several art and craft mediums – including exhibition installations and visual merchandising – before pursuing an accolade-filled time in interior design, it was finally clay which captured her heart.

Mostly an autodidact (self-taught), her artwork embraces her inner Wabi Sabi; the imperfect, impermanence and incomplete. She finds beauty and inspiration in nature, and in everyday life around her. 

Rika enjoys experimenting with texture and combining it with sculpture to tell a story. Her work is uniquely accented with precious metal lustres such as gold and platinum, as she feels that it brings life to a piece. 

“I often wondered why I am so attracted to adding gold, but I grew up in the 80s and in a time when glitter and sparkles were reserved for special occasions — and then only at night. I suspect that my love for using gold in my artwork is clearly my inner child’s demand to ‘put on the glitz’“.

Her current body of work consists of unique, on-off sculptures through which she explores anthropomorphism: sculpting mostly cats, then adding 2D illustrations such as tattoos, and 3D aspects such as human clothes and accessories to create a quirky, humorous, and joyful connection. And this is where her inner child comes out to play. She loves designing and then creating each one with their own individual personalities and characters. 

Rika has taken part in several gallery exhibitions over the years, with the most noted being the IN-RESPONSE – Art of the Space Age at the Rupert Museum, South Africa in 2022.