“The longest time at a stretch that I didn’t spend in Plauen and the Vogtland region was my time at university,” says Ines Falcke, laughing.

That was between 1983 and 1989 when she studied art at the teacher training college in Dresden. She returned to Plauen with her degree.

Since that time, she has been developing her professional and artistic careers in the Vogtland region, although her job and art tend to blend together. She has worked as an art teacher at the Diesterweg Grammar School in Plauen since 1992 – and has been a freelance artist since 1995.

“Plauen and the Vogtland area are the focal point of my life. I certainly travel a lot, but I always love coming back,” says Ines Falcke, and adds in her easy-going manner, “Somebody needs to stir up the provinces.” In her view, that means dedicating herself to the region.

This sense of dedication has many shades of colour for the mother of two adult children. As an art teacher, she tries to communicate art and culture as an enriching activity in life to her pupils at the Diesterweg Grammar School in Plauen; she also helps them use it as an opportunity to cope with the radical change in society that is taking place at the moment. The curriculum, which she helped draw up, allows pupils and teachers enough leeway to be artistically active themselves. She also passes this on to her teacher colleagues as a specialist advisor for art at grammar schools in south-west Saxony.

She is extraordinarily versatile as a freelance artist too. Her subject areas are painting, graphic arts, sculpture, intermedia design and photography – she used to take black-and-white photos, but now experiments with digital equipment.  She showed off many of her works at an exhibition to mark her 50th birthday in 2015. And she has published a catalogue entitled “Dance of Life” where she tells the story of “My Life in Photos” with a selection from the approx. 3,000 pictures that she has taken during the last 30 years. Exhibitions in the USA, France, Italy and many cities in Germany have attracted many people interested in art in recent years.

As a member of the Chemnitz Artists’ Network, the BDK Association for Art Education, the Plauen Art Association and the Focus Europe Initiative, she deals with art teaching issues as a speaker at further training courses locally and nationally. It is important for her not to just touch on issues, but also further develop ideas. “Tertiary education centres are crucial for Plauen so that young people stay here. I’d like to create opportunities for them so that they can experience art and culture and develop them too,” she says, quoting one example. 

She not only implements this idea by helping to organise exhibitions for young artists at Plauen galleries, but also at her “Own Initiative Art House” in Eschenbach. Working with her husband Mario, she has been ensuring since 2011 that well-known artists make their way to the Vogtland region, young people can show off their works and visitors themselves can be artistically active too. “Our love of creativity and art were the things that encouraged us to breathe new life into an old country inn, which was 200 years old, in the hills in the Upper Vogtland area and use it as a studio, gallery and holiday home” – that is the statement on her home page. Visitors come to the romantic house right next to the Eschenbach stream for concerts, plays, films and exhibitions, but also for workshops, to spend their holidays or to celebrate a real country wedding here.

Ines Falcke experiences much of her own creativity in the studio at the art house. She publishes her works under her pseudonym inesj.plauen, which is derived from her maiden name Jasinski and the place of her birth, Plauen. This too enables Ines Falcke to demonstrate her links with Plauen and the Vogtland region.