There are people whose life stories feel like a map of tides: one decision leads to another, one place folds naturally into the next, and what looks from the outside like change is really a kind of returning. For Belgian artist Rikki Tollenare, the route back has always been water.
She was 29 when she crossed the Atlantic for the first time. The invitation came from a family friend who had taught her to sail years earlier in Belgium. “He said, ‘We could use you on the crew,’” she remembers. “And I just said, ‘Hell yeah. Sure.’” The boat was a 65-foot Van Damme, sturdy but far from sleek. They left late, stopped for repairs, waited for spare parts in the Canaries, and finally pushed across from Gibraltar. “We were not the best sailors,” she says, laughing. “But it was such a great trip. I absolutely loved it.”
That crossing opened something. More crossings followed. A stretch working on yachts as crew, then in the galley. A few years living by the rhythms of other people’s boats. And then, in 2003, a quiet landing: a rented flat in Palma, winter varnishing jobs, freelance cooking in the summers. A small life with room to grow inside it. The flat was bare. She could have filled it quickly, cheaply, without much thought. But she still had her paints. “I thought, I could go to Ikea… or I could make something myself,” she says. So her old materials, boxes of oil paints and glazes she had used while running a restoration studio in Belgium, were shipped across the sea in two heavy crates. The same crates, she notes, her parents had used when moving their belongings home from South Africa decades earlier. The story, even then, was layered.
The first canvases she made in Palma were abstract, textured, thick with brush marks and scraped-back layers. Soon, though, lived experience started to seep in. Masts appeared as lines. Hulls became forms. Then came torn book pages, sailing manuals, weather notes, old newspapers softened into translucency by oil. “The oil makes the paper transparent,” she explains. “So you see the print from the back, and the boat in front. Your eye’s not quite sure what it’s seeing. It feels a bit like memory. Two things happening at once.”
By 2014, the sea had moved fully to the centre of her work. She began painting waves, not singularly but as a commitment, a lifelong series, open-ended, unhurried: 100 Waves. “I’ve always worked in series,” she says. “You go deeper when you paint the same thing again and again.”
She has now reached wave number 91. The final nine will come when they are ready. There is no pressure in this. No sense of finishing for finishing’s sake. The Waves project is something like a tide in her work: reliable, cyclical, always returning.
But last year, a different current pulled her in a new direction. She spent time living in the Netherlands, near a long river and a reed-fringed landscape that invited slow looking. Her studio there was a glass veranda: light-filled in winter, too hot to bear in summer. She drew constantly. She sketched on trains, in fields, and sitting by the water. During that period she joined an online course about sensing place, and something shifted. “I’ve always had a sewing machine,” she says. “My mum worked in batik all her life. So cloth was always part of the house. And one day I put paint and stitch together and it just… made sense.”
What followed is the body of textile work that has been capturing attention here in Mallorca. She works on vintage linens and tea towels, some acquired, many inherited. The fabric carries its own stories. Her needle draws fast, expressive lines: a cat waiting in the garden; stacked cookbooks; jars and utensils on a shelf; the rhythm of reeds along a riverbank.
She turns one over and smiles. “The back is all the decisions,” she says. “All the movement, without the tidying.”
The series known as Grandma’s Kitchen has struck an emotional chord with viewers. The cloth itself feels familiar — domestic, used, softened by time — and the stitched line feels like memory in motion. “How many conversations has a tablecloth heard?” she says. “When people see the work, they start talking about their own grandmothers. The room changes. And yes, it’s sentimental. But it’s also about safety. A kitchen can be a safe place.”
There is a quiet through-line in this work: her mother. Now in her late eighties, her eyesight is failing, but her decades of batik: dyed wax, fine cracking lines, deep colour over colour, live on in Rikki’s hands. “I sometimes cut pieces of her batik into my work,” she says. “It feels like adding a new verse to a song.”
Her sketchbooks from the Netherlands show a similar sensitivity. Pages of reeds, birds, bridges, repeated and rephrased. “The sound of wind through reeds is like a rhythm,” she says. “And then the birds and insects make their own rhythms inside it.”
She is clear that she is not trying to deliver a grand statement. “I’m not chasing a big message,” she says. “It’s curiosity. What happens if I dye this? What happens if I stitch that line in the air? If a piece carries some tenderness, that’s enough.”
But the world seeps in. A textile piece responding to the war in Gaza sits quietly on a shelf. “I was so upset,” she says. “Sometimes you have to answer with your hands, even if it’s only a small voice.”
Her studio today is a lived space with a gigantic olive tree outside, cats weaving between fabric stacks, colour tests pinned to a repurposed canvas, a slightly stern stitched self-portrait made by looking directly in the mirror: “You can see the concentration,” she laughs. “I didn’t draw it first. I just went for it.”
She describes her discipline simply: “I don’t get bored. If anything, I have too many ideas.”
Sailing, cooking, painting, stitching: each taught her something different. “Sailing taught me to look for a long time. Cooking taught me colour and instinct. Painting taught me patience. Stitch taught me to listen. It’s all attention.”
Then, gently: “And it’s all home. Water, thread, paper, I recognise myself there. One line at a time,” she says. “That’s how you cross an ocean. And that’s how you make a life.”
Rikki is hosting an Art at Home event in November. Everyone is welcome to attend.
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