Rachel de Joode

Rachel de Joode has been commissioned to create her first public sculpture—a large outdoor work for the new sculpture garden of De Nederlandsche Bank, a landmark in the heart of Amsterdam. The sculpture is now installed and open to the public, please take a look when you can!

Rachel's current practice incorporates AI as a creative tool, feeding custom datasets of previous works into algorithms to generate unexpected foundations for new pieces. She's particularly interested in machinic ways of seeing and interpretation, exploring how AI can perceive, interpret and translate her artistic language. She then reintroduces the physical dimension by sculpting and molding clay with her hands, embracing intuition and playfulness in a fluid negotiation between human intention and algorithmic unpredictability.

Her permanent outdoor public sculpture "Gestures in Human Space" embodies this approach—a form hesitating at its own finality, caught between movement and pause. With pastel translucent tones and surfaces alive with traces, it invites viewers to move around it, offering no clear orientation but rather possibilities of form and embodiment. Its contours appear both soft and unyielding, existing in a liminal space between abstraction and the bodily, suggesting muscle and underlying structures beneath the surface.

By allowing AI to take over part of the reflection process, de Joode discovered a new sensitivity and openness in her work. This relinquishing of control paradoxically heightened her artistic intuition, shifting from mastery to discovery—creating a meeting point where digital and analog converge, carrying the trace of her hand.

April 17, 2025