“I think every material has a personality. Stone, metal, gold, silver, bronze, bricks, aluminium. All materials.” No matter how crude or precious, Lene believes “we can play on them all like instruments.”

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When I first came across Lene Bødker’s work it was on my computer—a far cry from experiencing her sculptures in person. I was researching artists and came across her latest solo exhibition, “My Inner Garden” which had just opened in May 2021 at Davis Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark.

At first, the material of Lene’s sculptures looked like ice. A cloudy, sometimes cold looking material that I couldn't quite see through, but at the same time seemed warm, even soft, malleable. Resin maybe, possibly wax, a type of silicone. Once I discovered the material was in fact glass, I understood that not only had I underestimated the beauty and weight of Lene’s pieces, I was reminded that jumping to conclusions will always undermine experience. By simply seeing and treating something differently it can in fact, behave in entirely new ways. Enticed by a challenge, Lene saw glass as an “instrument that was fascinating, and provoking, and difficult” and something that was worthy of pursuit.

This limited understanding of glass, beyond function, is exactly why when you see all of Lene’s work, many can’t believe the material. How under hammer, chisel and grinder could it respond so generously and courageously. “Only rarely do I hit the wrong spot and it cracks or shatters,” Lene says assuringly.

Try as you might, you won’t get through a day without interacting or benefiting from the beauty of glass. If you’re reading this right now, glass is likely allowing that. An always present in-between material that surrounds, enables and protects us. We see the world and ourselves more clearly because of it. Eye glasses, window panes, mirrors, lightbulbs, cameras, microscopes, telescopes, smartphones, TVs. Glass has allowed us to capture and remember history, and predict parts of our futures. It’s fundamentally changed the way we live, how we see the world, how we eat and drink, how we celebrate, entertain. Glass is a necessity and an inevitability for us to evolve as a species. Glass is one of the most spectacular, resilient and regenerative materials in the world, one that can be shattered, melted down, and reused an infinite amount of times, and live on, and on, again, and again, and again, returning renewed each time.

It’s no wonder that Lene Bødker has dedicated her artistic practice to this material, one she sees as “holy, and spiritual” approached not unlike a religion, one she has devoted herself to entirely. “I wanted to dedicate myself to glass. To go as far as I could. To see how far I would go. To be friends with it. To have it as my material where I could express all my inner feelings and philosophies and whatever else I was dealing with at that time.”

It was a Friday morning when I first met Lene Bødker. June 4, 2021 around 10:30 am. She’d generously offered to pick me up in her car at Roskilde Station, 30-minutes by train west of Copenhagen, a short drive to her studio at Roskilde Gasvaerk.

People often speak of the feeling that they’ve “already met someone” once in their presence. What I experienced with Lene was less placeable but at the same time quietly acute. So quiet that it was only with hindsight that I was able to capture the effortless memory of that day; Why it was so natural, so comfortable. I was in a new city, one year into a new project, sitting beside a person with a different mother tongue who I was about to interview, but none of it felt foreign or without ease. “Have you eaten yet?” was one of the first things Lene said to me. I hadn’t, but I remember being hungry once she’d asked. Like jumping into a parent’s car after school, it felt familiar and routine. Not like I’d met her before, but that I was always going to.

“I always had an inner life, but I didn’t have the courage to let it out, explore it, allow it to express itself on the outside. Defend myself. Stand-up for my beliefs. Emotions and tenderness stayed on the inside. I was longing to be an adult. This way I could decide where I wanted to go, where I wanted to stay, where to be. I found it no fun to grow up where I was.”

Born and raised in Langeland, a Danish island located between the Great Belt and Bay of Kiel. The third largest island in Denmark sandwiched between the two largest bodies of land, Jutland and Zealand. More specifically, Lene grew up in Bagenkop, which at the time of her childhood had around 500 inhabitants, “Most of which were fishermen” she says “...and fishermen are different from farmers. People go out to sea in all types of weather, they are tough people.”

Growing up in a family that followed the conventional norms of the time, her father a bricklayer, with his own business, her mother, a seamstress, who made all their clothes. Bookended by two brothers; one older one younger. One man, one woman, two boys, and a “little girl brought up by the sea” she says. A male dominated household by numbers and emotional temperament. Femininity and softness was not so encouraged, but rather seen as a weakness. “My father was a very expressive, alpha-type man. Debating where possible.”

“It wasn’t the easiest place for me to grow up. I was a very sensitive child. The school system at that time was also very outdated. It got better as I got older but it was a very complicated time. I was mobbed daily.” Mobbed in Danish is ‘Mobbet’ meaning, bullied, beaten. Lene was hit by other children. “Somehow I managed to get through those seven years in school which were…” Lene lets out a Burrrrr with her head shaking ‘no’ in her hands “...awful” she finishes.

As children they were completely free to roam. “We could move wherever we liked as long as we could use our feet and our bicycle.” They were living just outside the small town and “as soon as I stepped foot off the school bus, I would run home, change clothes, and go directly to the farmer’s house down the road where I could just be myself, and have my own world, and have no kids mobbing me.” Some nights Lene wouldn’t even return home, sleeping the night in the barn, with the cows, “mooing and pooing” all in ears-shot and arms-reach she tells me. “Amongst the hay!” she adds smiling, as if to ensure me that it was more than comfortable.

Lene first experienced the feeling of true safety and a sense of self not while being around people, but while being alone. Spending time in nature or around animals was where her nervous system could finally still, where she could hear herself breathe, and only then did she begin to recognise a feeling of warmth inside her.

Although she’d always wanted to be set free of Langeland, and the restrictions she felt on her, “from the way of living there, to the restrictions you put on yourself” it wasn’t until she was nearing the end of her time at The Danish Design School when Lene recalls once again “isolating” herself. “I was addicted to work and the feeling of freedom brought on from solutide… There was a sense of safety when I was working. I was the only one in control of my work and how I shaped it.”

“Just as in childhood when I did not feel seen, felt I did not fit in, it is easy to repeat that pattern in your adult life. I have had to admit that such a belief system is not particularly constructive towards my own development. You become your own worst enemy. Breaking free from old patterns and experiences from one's childhood is a challenge, but there is so much energy and joy to be gained once the old ghosts are chased out the gate.”

Lene Bødker graduated in 1992 after six years at The Danish Design School. This was the year she decided to work with glass, her material of focus during her last two years of school. After graduation, Lene went to Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic Sea off the south coast of Sweden to spend the summer blowing glass at Charlie Meaker`s Studio. Lene was determined to find a new way of seeing and approaching this material.

Lene’s matte technique on glass began early and has continued to be applied to almost all of her sculptures.

“The first objects I made I wanted to ensure they weren’t polished or shiny. I wanted matte so it created an inner sense of depth.”

This technique came from an intuition almost as a request on behalf of the material itself. “I don’t think glass likes to be looked through,” she began. “I felt shy on behalf of glass. We all just look through it when we want. We see directly through it. At least we think we can. We think by seeing through it we know it, that we know how it can be used and what it should be used for. This is also an attitude that we as people apply to other people, we think we know them and we don’t. We need to learn to see all people over time. Some are quiet, some are expressive, and we have different moods during the day, at night, and we need to respect each other for that, and to accept that we have many selves within us. We need to give people more space. This was a big inspiration for me. To allow and enable an opportunity where the real value of glass could be seen and expressed.” 

Lene works with a technique called "Cire-perdue" or Lost-wax casting, a method that has been used for thousands of years. “The process is similar to bronze casting,” Lene says. “First you make a clay model, then the wax model, then the casting mould which goes into the kiln filled with glass pellets. Finally the cooling process - which takes around a month, to avoid tension in the glass. When the kiln is at room temperature, I break the mould. From there, the glass is now ready to be grinded, polished or treated with a chisel.” The oldest known example of this technique is a 6,000-year old amulet from the Indus Valley Civilization. While still considered a traditional and somewhat rare technique, there are many other artists working with lost-wax casting. The glass artists that most inspire Lene are the late Czech-born artist couple Jaroslava Brychtová and Stanislav Libenský, German-born Ann Wolff, Swedish-born Bertil Vallien, and the late American-born Howard Ben Tré.

“Why do you make glass sculptures when the Czech’s make them so much better?” An art critic once said to Lene. “I think you should stick to your flat glass panels.” In 2007, two-years prior to this comment, Lene’s sculpture “Section VII” won The Kanazawa Glass Grand Prize Award, one of the most prestigious glass awards in the world out of Japan.

Lene’s studio is a generous set-up for any artist. Two large spaces with high ceilings and floods of natural light, both as organised and well kept as the other. One studio for making one studio for displaying. The second, like her very own private permanent exhibition of her work. 

“I sometimes feel protective when people request to buy a piece of my work”

On that Friday morning we started our conversation in the studio where the majority of her pieces lived. I’m following closely behind as Lene is talking, heading towards a door at the back of her larger space. As she opens the door there’s another small room and a burst of colour moves over our faces, light shining through each of the pieces, bringing each one to life. More magnificent glass sculptures are here, hiding as if in secret behind the door. “These really feel like my children, I find it hard to let them go out into the world, into different directions. Each piece means something to me, each one is representative of what I was going through at that time.”

In 1992, the same year that Lene started working with glass, her mother passed away from cancer. This loss created a deep void within the family, one Lene did not anticipate so vast. “There wasn’t much time to plan. After only six months of treatment, the end had already come. It happened all so fast.”

Her mother, in addition to being educated as a seamstress, was also a painter, working mostly on canvas. “Creative expression was important to her and she found it as often as possible in between looking after the house, being a wife, a mother to three children and also working on her husband’s bookkeeping for the bricklaying business. She was a very busy woman, but as a painter, this was never a path she was able to pursue sincerely or as priority.” Her mother was a huge role model to Lene growing up, but even so, Lene always had this picture of her mother as being weak. Maleness seemed like the only condition that allowed a true sense of control and recognition of one's life.

Just as Lene had once seen glass as fragile and by that nature female, it became clear this was the same lens through which she once saw her mother. A lens that - though she was convinced was clear - blurred the unseen power of consistency, perseverance and silent maternal strength, bubbling out of sight like a dormant volcano concealing the fire and fuel under the endless duty of daily domesticities. To hold things together so seamlessly and without fuss in itself undermined the work. By making it all look so simple, it was seen as such. Through her grace and effortlessness, her silent endeavours were only ever noticed once she stopped.

“It suddenly became obvious how much my mother was holding us all together. How much she was doing behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly.”

What she understands now about this perceived “weakness” was actually her greatest fear. “My mother represented a life that suffocated an artist. Yes it required strength, but the duty never enabled the space or time to explore her creativity. I always wished that my mother could be stronger, to fight for what she really wanted to do and that was to be an artist. In many ways, an independent woman.”

At the time of her mother’s passing in 1992, Lene had been living in Copenhagen for six years. At this time, she decided to return back for a short period to help her father get some routine back and sort out the house. Find someone in the neighborhood who could help him with the cooking. “He’d never cooked before, done laundry” the roles between father and daughter, overnight, had completely reversed.

At this time, Lene’s father invited her to travel to Italy with him, just the two of them. The trip was originally planned with him and her mother, but rather than cancelling, he felt it was right to take Lene. It was a two-week vacation. On this trip she was reminded again, just how much her mother was organising and structuring, to allow her husband the ability to operate in the world as he wanted. “Now I was the one making all the decisions. Booking flights, accommodation, choosing restaurants and making reservations, telling my Dad when he needed to eat, when to shower. It was unbelievable.” During a period of great grief, having lost her mother, and the strong female role model she needed in her life, she was put into a position that required strength to support her father during this loss. She herself never managed to find room to grieve. Lene’s father died 18-years later in 2010.

When it comes to relationships, and the negotiation of priorities and independence - romantic or familial - I ask Lene if she’s ever managed to find a balance without strain. “I have been there many times,” Lene says laughing. “Many times… if you can call it many times. The partners I had before my husband — although they were artists and creatives themselves, they found it very difficult to accept me working so much, they felt pushed away. I wasn’t able to be present with them as much as they needed or wanted, so it was a conflict, possibly a jealousy of my work, as it took my time away from them. Jealous as if my work was my lover.” Finding what you want to do with your life, and being so absorbed by it that you lose time when you’re in it, that is something to envy, something you can’t compete with. “You jump into people where you seek something you don’t have. Something you haven’t lived out by yourself.”

Lene’s 2021 solo show, “My Inner Garden” exhibited a total of 29 pieces that had been created over an eight year period, from 2013 - 2020. Most of the pieces had been shaped during 2013, a period of time when Lene was very ill. “You cannot not just blame your parents for this and that. ‘This is why I got stressed. This is why I am always working so much to be accepted by my Dad’ and so on” this is something she learnt during a very tough period in her life, one that lasted for many years between 2013 - 2019. At the age of 54 Lene could barely leave the house. In the midst of her life in Copenhagen, and constantly pushing herself to be more productive, to make more, to create more - the inherent masculine temperament being the drive - the soft feminine animal inside her finally took a stand and demanded rest.

“I was so small. I felt like a 90-year-old woman.” After feeling so high after a group show in 2012 at Design Museum Denmark, just the thought of finding a way back to that point, a point that took so much out of her, “that alone floored me.” Just as Lene pushed and stressed the limits of glass, it seems she had taken that method and applied it to her own mind and body, as if she too needed to wear herself out to find her inner truth and essence. 

“All that you create in your head as a small child, it follows you, really, until you get old, unless you can learn to understand it. I thought I’d been working with these terms. When I was a child I thought to myself, “I will show them all. I will show them that I am not dumb. I will show them all I can do whatever I like. Even if I don’t get rich. I will do what I feel, what I want. Somehow I was the vulnerable child that couldn't spell and couldn’t write. In school I was lousy because I was so stressed. I couldn’t take in all the information. I really thought I had to fight. That my life was a fight, and if you grow up thinking life is a fight, if you get that in your system” Lene pauses when she’s saying this, head down, “It’s not healthy, it’s really not healthy.”

At that time she couldn't make her craft at all. She couldn’t drive a car, leave her home, or even come to the studio where we were sitting in Roskilde. All she could manage at that time was shaping works in clay, sitting at her kitchen table. To just touch clay gave her grounding. “I felt I could tell a story of how I felt during this period.”

“There comes a time where you have to face it. Ask yourself, ‘Why do you think your life needs to be a fight and a struggle and so hard, and always feel like you’re not appreciated and you’re not good,’ and blah blah blah blah” she trails off. “You need to protect yourself, say ‘Yes’ and say ‘No.’ Be honest, towards yourself. Really find out how something feels when you say ‘Yes’ or say ‘No.’ And why do I say ‘Yes’ when everything inside me wants to say ‘No.’”

“As a woman we have these antennas. I am of course speaking about my experience here. Thinking… ‘How is he? How are they? What can I do? Why are they doing this?’ Instead of staying in yourself. Don’t dig into the other so much. Be in yourself. Do not analyse the other so much. Stay in your own body. Do not go into the other person’s body. This has been a big learning process for me. Always thinking ‘How does my father feel? Why is he grumpy? Why is he sad? How does my mother feel?’ Constantly feeling like I need to help orchestrate and soothe. It’s normal for a child to ask, ‘Where are my parents?’ but if you continue as an adult, constantly searching for moments to be soothed, like your parents did or couldn’t do, this will lead to an unhappy life.

Her piece "Gaia", a small tower of breasts symbolises the strength and connection that all mothers have, not just for their children, but as the ones who feed and sustain the world.

Lene was meeting her husband’s grandchildren for the first time, and as Lene walked into the room, her step daughter was breastfeeding her baby. “This moment had a big impression on me,” Lene says. “The calmness and peacefulness was almost like an aura, as if a bomb could explode and she’d continue sitting there, nursing.” As beautiful as it was, it also brought on a sense of longing for Lene. “...Because at that time, I really needed a mum. Someone who could stroke my cheek and say ‘Easy Lene, easy, everything will be ok, and you will get out of this. It’s not fun, but everything will be ok’ this mother energy, I was yearning for, enormously… For all those who need a Mum” Lene thought, “I will make Gaia for them.”

As powerful as the Gaia sculpture is, there’s also a playfulness to it. Standing just under 2ft tall with a delicate orange-red hue, buoyant breasts circling around top to bottom, it radiates with the sustenance of not just one mother, but of many generations of mothers. If milk were to come from each breast, it could feed and soothe many newborns. A symbolic fountain of maternity and connection. 

Lene met her husband Ebbe in 2000, he was 59 and she was 41. As he had already had three children himself, “I knew I wouldn’t have the opportunity to have a baby with him.”

“Ebbe was 80 years old at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, so we had to be very careful,” Lene shares. Being calm and introverted was suddenly a global requirement needed to get through this period. “How odd” Lene says “that suddenly, the state I’ve always needed in order to find peace, was suddenly a necessary measure to limit the spread of the virus; Solitude. No longer was there a need to run to New York and get connections, go to London and find a gallery, return to Paris and meet her gallerist, being overly social and extroverted - for the first time in her life - was actually deemed as a negative. “Ok, now I can finally be myself, and go inwards… For it not to be seen as ‘strange’ if I don’t go to a lot of family parties or be judged for wanting to work. I can just be in my cocoon.” Lene escaped to her summerhouse in Lumsås in March 2020 for the whole period.

“I am stronger now, mentally and physically, since that period. It was very healing for my nervous system. I regained the inner strength that I had lost.”

Lene’s solo show, “My Inner Garden” returned Lene to a period of time where she felt most connected, surrounded by nature, and the seasons.

“Many of my works originate from an intention to put myself and the viewer in a state of unity with nature. I really feel I came back both to myself, and my work. I have made works I am very proud of. I have told stories I wouldn’t have been able to tell when I was 40 or 50, nor would I have had the courage then to express these ideas.”

“When I have these moments of pure presence, I celebrate them. They are fleeting, these moments of presence, but they are what sustain my essence. They come so quietly and gently you need to be very aware you don’t miss their arrival. They give you a sense of contact with time, dimensions. To me, these moments are sacred and should be protected.”

In 2012, Lene received the Danish Arts Foundation Lifetime Grant. “I still don’t understand how I got this. It’s a very, very big honor. There are so many skilled incredible peers of mine that deserve this too.” This award can only be passed on to someone else once the prior recipient dies. There are currently 275 artists in Denmark with this honor.

In the face of mortality, with all that she has made and achieved, Lene Bødker feels utterly content with her complete body of work as it stands today. “I do, I really do. I think I have proved enough, really… I don’t have to prove anything more, I work now for me and me alone. The pieces I have coming out of my hands now are coming because they have to. Not for anyone out there. Not for external validation. It’s because I can’t help it.”

The evolution of Lene’s relationship with herself is not dissimilar to the evolution of her relationship with glass. She challenged a material that she knew had more to offer, more to give. Glass is not a simple, mundane, utilitarian, functional, or worse, boring material. It’s a material with endless potential and spirit, one that Lene has elevated and glorified and allowed all its potential to be cracked open, filled with new form and new light. “I have nothing else to prove,” she says again, so softly as if to herself.

“I am closest to my essence and to God when I create. I use the word God but I really mean my essence, my inner higher self, my inner world. It’s a meditation when I create. I am totally present when I work with my hands and with the clay. Those moments give me enormous pleasure. Though I never had a baby, I imagine this is the closest I’ll ever get to the feeling of breastfeeding, feeling my body working to sustain each piece; An interaction that gives my life meaning, and through care and repetition grows my body of work. Being present is the best place in life you’ll ever be. Being in that state is divine.”

Being in Lene Bødker’s presence made me feel stronger. Not because she stands at 180cm but because of her consistent honesty, sensitivity, and deep vulnerability. Speaking with such strength, passion, and vividity, her words were like buoys within our conversation, navigating us from the beginning to end, through tough and tender memories of her life. It’s impossible not to sound sentimental when I speak of Lene, and the times I’ve spent with her, because sentimental is exactly how I feel. In June 2021, at a time of such grand unrest, strength and clarity is precisely what Lene and her body of work brought me. I will be forever grateful to have met the magnetic spirit that is Lene Bødker, and to continue our friendship into the great beyond.

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