Living By Making

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.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mianelle_studio/
Web: https://www.mianelle.dk/

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.
Web: www.mianelle.dk
Instagram: mianelle_studio

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.Receive letters with draiwings by signing up here: www.mianelle.dk and follow me on my Instagram: mianelle_studio

In this episode of Living by Making, I share the story of spending four days alone at a local market in Denmark, trying to sell my art from a small tent between crystal sellers, ceramic vulvas, and a tanning salon.
What begins as a practical attempt to earn money slowly turns into a reflection on class, visibility, the art world, survival, and what it feels like to create while living with a nervous system in constant alarm.
This episode moves between humour, exhaustion, social anxiety, art, and the strange reality of trying to build a life through making.
It is also an episode about the body — and the small sensory rituals that sometimes help us stay present when everything inside us wants to flee.
From local market to museum show.
Instagram: mianelle_studioWeb: www.mianelle.dk Email: studio@mianelle.dk 

I share fragments from my life:
living on almost nothing,
standing in a supermarket unable to choose,
and working for years inside a prison with men convicted of severe crimes — where something unexpected began to unfold.
This is an episode about vulnerability, dignity, and the invisible structures shaping an artist’s life.
And maybe also a question:
What is art worth — and to whom?
—
You are not alone. I see you.
🌿 Website: www.mianelle.dk
🌿 Instagram: mianelle_studio
🌿 Support my PodCast and work: patreon/mianelle

This week, I received a working grant from the Danish Arts Foundation — after fifteen years of rejection.
In this episode, I reflect on what it means to finally be “recognised” as an artist.
On the idea of the elite — and the quiet feeling of still being outside of it.
On the realities of working conditions in the art world, money, and the body under pressure.
This is a personal essay about value, survival, and the moment something shifts — not in the system, but inside.Instagram : @mianelle_studio Web: www.mianelle.dk

This episode moves between past and present, between memory and the act of making.It is about drawing, painting, and trying to hold on to something that keeps slipping away. About childhood, repetition, and the body remembering before the mind does.A reflection on what it means to make something good—and what it costs to keep trying.Follow my instagram: @mianelle_studio or visit my website www.mianelle.dk

A poetic reflection on the role of the artist in a capitalist world.Between money, meaning, and a night walk in the forest, I explore what it means to create—and belong—today.Website: www.mianelle.dk Instgram: mianelle_studio

From preparing breakfast for Airbnb guests at my farmhouse in Denmark to thinking about class, grants, day jobs, art school debt, and what it means to make art while carrying a working-class history in the body, this is an episode about survival, shame, labour, and the strange intimacy of trying to build a life through creative work.Instagram: @mianelle_studioWeb: www.mianelle.dkEmail: studio@mianelle.com

What happens when your integrity and your survival pull in different directions?
In this episode, I reflect on the tension between staying true to your artistic voice and trying to make a living within a system that often asks for something else.
From my farmhouse in Denmark, I move between the soil, the studio, and the gallery world — through experiences with commercial galleries, years of holding on to my own way of working, and the quiet question that keeps returning:
Can you build a life as an artist without compromising what matters most?
This is an episode about money, shame, freedom, and the cost of staying true.www.mianelle.dk