Artists' statements tend to drift. The work changes, the vocabulary follows, and what someone said in 2015 rarely survives contact with what they are making a decade later. Käthe Butcher's has barely moved.
On the subject, which has not changed
"It has always been about feelings, love and how to deal with intimacy — and chasing after intimate moments and special connections."
Chasing is the load-bearing word. It concedes that the moments are hard to catch and easy to miss, which is what the drawings are actually about — not intimacy as an achieved state, but the difficulty of it.
On what a drawing is for
"When people look at my artworks I want to give them a reflection of their own emotions, of moments from the past or a wish for the future."
Note who the work is aimed at. Not a viewer being shown something, but a viewer being handed back something of their own. It explains a great deal about how people talk about these drawings — they tend to describe the picture as being about them.
On femininity
"Femininity can be everything and nothing. It's individual. For me personally, it is something elegant yet strong."
Ten years on, her readers reach independently for almost the same phrase. "Delicate and strong at the same time" turns up again and again in the comments under her work, from people who have almost certainly never read the 2015 interview. They arrived at her own words on their own.
On the early work
"Erotic artwork that is melancholic and mournful."
A four-word summary of the early drawings that most critics needed a paragraph for. The eroticism was never separable from the sadness, and she said so first.
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