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They seem to come from underground. Short and thick and as insubstantial as they are vulnerable. That's how Christien Rijnsdorp's sculptures look. Sometimes they have a trunk, sucker, or is it a sex part? Arms and head are usually missing. Although we do not know Rijnsdorp's archetypal creatures, we see them unmistakably as a living species. Clumsily, they scan the world. Somber, however, they are not. Their forms, postures and gestures are too humorous for that. "My images usually arise out of astonishment at life or a particular situation," Rijnsdorp says.

In her first years of activity as a sculptor, Rijnsdorp made sculptures of iron wire and painted papier-mâché. These sculptures were almost graphic in character. Balance and equilibrium were an important point of reference. In the late 1980s, the first organic creatures emerged, which Rijnsdorp has been making ever since. They have a core of polyurethane foam and a skin of cotton and latex rubber. She colors that skin dark gray-brown, hence that feeling of earthworms that can creep up on you.

While at first they are groups of tuberous creatures standing or lying together like a herd, later they acquire more and more animal and human traits. In later images, they increasingly react to the constructed environment in which they find themselves. Some perform true circus acts.

For her pedestal sculpture "The Hef," Rijndorps stacked three figures on top of each other. Again, they have no heads or arms and hardly any upper body. From afar they appear almost as an abstract stack, only closer can you perceive details such as navels and folds. Together they form a humorous and seemingly precarious little tower. Balance remains an important theme in Rijnsdorp's later work as well. It is about the sometimes oh-so-small difference between standing and falling.