Living By Making

B has painted a portrait of her dead mother.

Alone in her studio, feverish but not ill, she moves between the painting, an overgrown vegetable garden, unpaid expenses, and the question that keeps returning: what kind of artist is she supposed to be?

Meanwhile, Copenhagen is filling up with art fairs, openings, champagne, oysters, gallerists and artists who know how to dress for the occasion.

B stays home.

Until she gets hungry.

A new literary episode of Living by Making about art, ambition, money, mothers, the body — and the strange relief of being somewhere no one is looking at you.

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In this episode of Living by Making, I tell the story of a woman called B.
B is an artist. She lives in Denmark. She makes things, worries about money, searches for meaning, and tries to understand what it means to build a life around making.

But this time, I wanted to tell the story differently.

By stepping outside myself and writing in the third person, B became both me and someone I could observe from a distance.

This is a story about art, identity, ambition, money, and the strange space between the life we imagine for ourselves and the life we are actually living.

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For years, I believed my fear around money came from being an artist. But what if the story began much earlier?
In this episode, I reflect on ambition, art, class, family, and the beliefs we inherit without choosing them. Moving between my studio, memories of my parents, and the Danish countryside where I now live, I explore how my father's relationship with work and money quietly became my own—and what it might mean to finally let it go.
This is an essay about creativity, inheritance, and the possibility of finding a different way to live.
Living by Making is a podcast about building a life through art—not as a fantasy, but as a lived, ongoing practice.

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For eleven years, six months and twenty days, I have counted time differently.

In this episode I reflect on addiction, ambition, shame and the strange contradictions of building an artistic life. From AA meetings in Denmark to an artist residency in Berlin, from quietly observing a famous writer in my favourite café to confronting my own fear of being seen, this is an essay about longing—for recognition, belonging, and the courage to show up as oneself.

Along the way, I explore how perfectionism, social anxiety and the fantasy of becoming "someone" can keep us hidden, even while we desperately want to be found.

Part memoir, part meditation on art and recovery, this episode asks whether success begins not with trying harder—but with trying softer.

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In 2018, I was given the opportunity to create a monumental wall painting as part of a solo exhibition in a large gallery built around an empty swimming pool.

For two days, I painted obsessively — covering more than eighty square metres of wall with flowers, animals, and colour. The exhibition became one of the biggest artistic opportunities of my career. Yet, alone in a borrowed apartment the night before the opening, another story unfolded.

More than a year sober, I suddenly found myself on my way to buy a bottle of wine.

A story about making art, staying sober, and learning that every day counts.

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