Studio Diary - February 2025
Join (a slightly hungover) me in the studio as I catch you up on all things Haus of Cats this month - includes lady monsters, highlights from my recent exhibition at Ex Libris, and snippets of my latest project.
You can also read the transcript below:
February Studio Diary
Hey everyone, welcome back to my little studio. Today I'm going to catch you up on what happened in February. For those of you who don't know me — hello, welcome! I'm Elinor Trier, a professional artist living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark. On this channel I bring you behind the scenes of my life as an artist, all the stuff I get up to.
I should apologise in advance for being a little low energy today. I've just finished my recent exhibition, we had a big party, and I got a little bit drunk. Being very old now, it takes me about a week to recover from a night out. So: a bit flat, a bit February-ish. But I'm here, I'm showing up, and I really want to bring you in and let you know what's been going on.
Things Men Have Said To Me Instead Of Hello
If you saw last month's video, you'll know I said I'd be working on a new collection called Things Men Have Said To Me Instead Of Hello — and I'm really happy to report that I managed to spend a solid two weeks putting that collection together. It's been amazing. I've got three pieces finished and two more about halfway through, with a handful yet to start. But I'm off to a great start, and having that concentrated time at the beginning of a project means I got fully immersed. Now that I'm in it and know where I'm going, it's much easier to keep the business running alongside it and keep shuffling the work forward.
I'm not quite ready to share the pieces yet — I might give you a few cryptic corners so you can see the materials I've been playing with and how the inspiration from last month is translating. Only three people have seen the finished work so far, and the feedback has been great. I'm so excited to share this collection.
As you can probably guess from the title, I'm not sure I'll be able to share everything on YouTube — I'd rather not get demonetised. So I'll find a way to share the full collection on my own blog and in the email newsletter. If you're not already signed up, now's the time, because that's where everything uncensored will land.
The pieces are quite labour-intensive — a lot of slow, delicate handwork. Some are almost mosaic-like. Each one takes a long time to produce in a way that straight-up painting doesn't, so it will be a while before I have a complete collection to bring out into the world. I do have an exhibition lined up later in the year where I'm hoping to show this work, so I'll keep you posted.
What's Been Inspiring Me
We went to a fantastic exhibition called The Portal of Dreams — an exhibition of Symbolism, full of really beautiful work. There was one section in particular that stopped me in my tracks: all about monsters, and specifically monstrous women. Medusa, harpies, sea monsters — the full parade of mythical female beasts. I found it genuinely thrilling.
There's a whole thread forming in my mind around art monsters, female monsters, grotesque bodies, and I'm really excited to pull on it. Not right now, but it's there, waiting. Lady monsters. There's definitely something there.
Interestingly, the exhibition referenced Pre-Raphaelites, Art Nouveau, and William Morris quite a lot — and we'd just discovered a fantastic YouTube channel called Henny Talks, which led us down a rabbit hole via a Belgian Art Nouveau architect called Victor Horta (the sheer decorative beauty of what he created is mind-blowing) and a talk on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. It was rather wonderful to see those threads echo through the exhibition a couple of days later.
I also want to mention the animated film Flow — about a cat navigating a flooded world, making friends along the way, with no spoken dialogue whatsoever. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and it was deeply emotionally resonant. Communication is a central thread in my work — how we make ourselves understood — and this film was a beautiful exercise in conveying that without language. Highly recommend it. I think it may have won an Oscar. Brilliant, either way. I'll put links to all of this in the description.
Je Suis Wibbly-Wobbly Launch
I mentioned last month that I was launching the Je Suis Wibbly-Wobbly collection, and I'm delighted to report it's happened and the response has been just so heartwarming. The people who get my work, they really get it — and that's absolutely been the response here. People are genuinely excited, which is incredibly gratifying.
If you missed the launch, the collection is still up on the website. A number of pieces have sold but there are still some available. I made a couple of videos about the inspiration behind the work and why I made them, which were really fun. My husband interviewed me for one of them and was very gratified by the comments. I'll pop the links up as cards so you can have a look.
The Ex Libris Exhibition Finissage
The exhibition at Ex Libris is now over, and we had a wonderful finissage. A bunch of people came, we had a cracking party, and then — being so close to home — we brought everyone back for an after-party and margaritas.
The opening of an exhibition is always full of excitement and potential, but there's something particularly lovely about a closing event. It felt like a proper celebration of what had happened, and I felt a lot more relaxed. Some friends came over from Amsterdam — they've come for every single one of my exhibitions, which just makes you feel so loved. We also had people come in off the street, which was great — new faces, new conversations.
One of the pieces I showed was one I actually finished on this channel: A Quiet Night In — a big, lush lady reclining in a field of flowers. It was the first time she'd really been out in the world, and several people told me she was their favourite piece in the whole exhibition. Lovely to see her holding court under the gallery lights.
A really nice thing also came out of the exhibition: the little Little Wobbles — my tiny cat paintings that I usually only offer just before Christmas as an accessible, giftable way to own original art — have completely won over the guy who runs Ex Libris. He wants to keep them up as a semi-permanent installation. So if you're in the Copenhagen area, you can come down, see them in the flesh, and take one home if you fancy. It's been such a positive experience, sharing work I've beavered away on in the studio by myself for so long.
I've recorded bits of the whole process — setting up, getting everything ready, a little of the party — and I'll put it all together into a video to share in the next month or two.
Podcast Season Two
Another exciting thing: I've been reaching out to potential guests for the second season of the podcast. Season one was brilliant but, honestly, I overcomplicated the whole endeavour and it was exhausting. Season two is launching around end of May/beginning of June. It'll be audio only this time, with episodes releasing weekly — a much lighter workload, but still the same wonderful conversations.
The line-up so far is absolutely cracking. I've got Orla Stevens, a Scottish landscape painter you might know from YouTube; Roxy Van Bemmel, a Dutch painter; Amy McNee, a writer and author who does creative pep talks for creative people and has just published a book on creativity; the brilliant Tara Leaver from Cornwall, whose work is all about water and the sea; and Victoria Fry, who runs the Visionary Art Collective and New Visionary magazine out of New York. I'm thrilled that all these amazing people want to talk to me. I cannot wait.
What's Coming in March
Next month I have a trip to Liverpool planned to visit my best friend — not a city I've been to before, but I think it might be right up my street. It'll also be a week off, which I genuinely need. Christmas seems like a million years ago and I've been very deliberate this year about building in proper rest, because I didn't do that last year and I was very sad for it.
In between, I'll be weaving in a bit more work on Things Men Have Said To Me — nothing like a dedicated block, just the pockets of time that appear. Even getting the half-finished pieces done would be a satisfying goal. It might also be nice to pull out a canvas and do some straight-up painting, just to balance the more fiddly assemblage work of this collection.
And at the end of March, I'm recording the first batch of podcast interviews — always inspiring and exciting.
If this is your first video, I hope you'll go back and have a look through the back catalogue. Like it if you liked it, subscribe, and leave me a comment — I genuinely love chatting to you. That's the best bit of YouTube.
And if you want to see Things Men Have Said To Me Instead Of Hello as it arrives in the world, the best place to be is on the newsletter list. Head over to my website and sign up — that's where all the stuff I can't share on YouTube will live.
See you in the next one. Bye!
See more of my creative process in The Laboratory
