Amsterdam Creative | Monika Auch

Monika Auch is a fiber artist. She works with a computerized loom creating 3D sculptures and textile prints in silk screen technique.
She lives outside Amsterdam in a village at the Ijsselmeer, a manmade lake separated by dykes from the North Sea.

Monika grew up in Germany, received her MD in Amsterdam and worked as a medical practitioner before moving on to the Arts.
“I love working with my hands and especially fine work like sewing or – suturing.” She is a graduate of the Rietveld Academy.

At the end of WW II the small German country town where Monika’s widowed grandmother, Emilie lived with her 5 young children was shelled by planes.
Their house was hit by a shell and her mother, a young girl, was thrown right through the house and survived with mere scratches.
Then the Americans came and one young soldier from Pennsylvania befriended the kids.

After the Americans had left, parcels with food and clothes from the US arrived at her grandmother’s house.
They were dumbfounded by the gifts and had to figure out that Fritz, the young soldier had sent them.
From then on Christmas cards were sent back and forth and in 1985, forty years later, Fritz and his wife, Lou visited Monika’s family.
Fritz then told his story of the war. He had worked as an communications officer and luckily had never seen any action but was devastated by what he had witnessed.  So he sent parcels to Emilie and the children.

Monika describes Emilie as an exceptional woman.
“She raised me, too since my mother was very young when I was born.”

In 1985, weeks after Fritz and Lou had returned to Pennsylvania, a parcel arrived containing clothes for Monika.
One piece was a lovely red-brown woolen coat from the Pennsylvania mills that Monika loved and “wore, until it was literally in shreds!”

Monika stayed in contact with the couple for many years and cherishes the memory of this kindhearted man.

Monika’s current artistic research project is ‘The biography of my hands.’
She investigates how dexterity shaped her family’s history and her own.
Her sensitivity for materials and dexterity come from her grandmother’s skills in handiwork, cooking and gardening.
In the last century these were essential survival qualities in rural areas.
She works on large scale silk screen prints, based on her father’s architectural photographs. After the war he was employed
as a steel construction worker and carried his small Leica camera everywhere, leaving his daughter a legacy of postwar
documents and an eye for strong lines.
In a fusion of weaving and graphic prints, Monika is crafting an installation of linen threads and a blue grey workman’s overall.
She is wearing a contemporary wearable version of the jacket, made of her architectural prints on Tyvek.
Monika’s mentor at the Rietveld was Helly Oestreicher.