Julia Krause-Harder visits the Senckenberg Museum almost every week because she is fascinated by dinosaurs.
On her work table in the Goldstein studio there are several boxes filled with hundreds of fired clay pieces.
With a brush and paint, she designs the individual bones and vertebrae, drawing delicate stripes in lime green here or dabbing strong points in blue.
Each skeleton part is put in another box to dry.
When she's finished with it at some point, everything should be strung on steel wire and a mussaurus, a "mouse lizard", should emerge from the boxes.
An artistic experiment, because so far she has only made a dinosaur from many small pieces of clay lying down, just as it is found in real excavations. The making of the individual parts and the assembly of each of your dinosaurs requires a great deal of patience. "I just need it to make things work out well, you can't just do that on your left buttock," she says with a laugh and continues to work with concentration.
She knitted, sewed and built for the Lesothosaurus from Africa, whose metal skeleton is covered with countless artistic knitted parts, for more than three months.
She attached the parts, some of which have complicated Norwegian patterns, with colorful cable ties in such a way that they look like protruding spikes.
The trained seamstress also likes to wear self-knitted sweaters with artistic animal motifs or the Matterhorn on her own body - a motif that currently fascinates her.
An incomplete sweater was also the trigger for the design of the knitted dinosaur, she explains.
A lot of perseverance is required
Their aim is to artistically recreate every dinosaur found and named on earth.
At the moment she is at dinosaur number 40, roughly.
Scientists argue whether there are 700 species or less.
The way to the goal is still long and requires a lot of perseverance.
The artist keeps fit with sport: with capoeira, the Brazilian fighting dance, with football, table tennis and skiing.
The dinosaurs, usually more than two meters long, stand on top of each other and hang under the ceiling in the old warehouse of a former factory in Sachsenhausen, in whose remise the Atelier Goldstein is housed.
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Too little space is a big problem for Julia Krause-Harder and her works of art.
After elementary school, language therapy school and a school year in England, the now forty-eight-year-old finished high school at a boarding school and later trained as a tailor at the Frankfurt School for Fashion and Clothing.
Although she also passed her high school diploma there, she couldn't find a job on the primary labor market and ended up in workshops for disabled people.
With candy wrappers, plastic foils and cable ties
In the Rödelheim rehab workshop of the Frankfurt Association for Social Homesteads, she still works today when she is not in the studio, offers tours of her own exhibitions on Sundays, teaches IGS Nordend students or leads teacher training courses.
"Assembling mouthpieces or just sewing bags in the workshop, that just doesn't challenge me," says Krause-Harder, who likes to refer to herself as an "idea syringe" and thus hits the core of all her work: She constantly has new ideas, and they are usually very extensive.