Emilie Bobek

STUDIO VISIT

7115: Your work often feels rooted in gesture and material presence. How can you describe your craft?

Emilie: In my work I often explore the meaning in materials and objects. Usually, it starts with a fascination for a surface, a shape, or an object from a memory I’ve had. I examine it from different angles to explore its meaning, free from the usual presumptions of its use or its relation to the human mind and body.
I find great mystery in mainstream or ”normal” objects like lightbulbs, picture frames, or even a bathing ring. For me, there is much more to explore than what meets the eye—first the use and function, then the story behind the object, and then what it might become when I twist, turn, and create it in another material, like ceramics, where I can work with surface and composition. It is almost like creating my own universe.
The result is an engagement with the objects that surround us. Whether they are man-made or natural, they can give a sense of presence by reminding us that objects may not always be what they seem.

AIn the heart of Copenhagen’s historic Meatpacking District, Emilie Bobek’s studio sits quietly in the White District. Once an industrial center, the space is now a listed national heritage site. Inside, the studio holds a quiet tension. Concrete, ceramic, wood, and metal lie scattered across tables in various stages of transformation. Some forms are intact. Others are cracked or waiting to be fired. Everything is in motion.
This is the language Emilie works in. Her practice is rooted in material exploration, where form, surface, and meaning are in constant negotiation. She invites resistance. She embraces unpredictability. Nothing is fixed. Objects are not simply made. They emerge, shift, behave.
Now, so does she.
Pregnant with her first child, Emilie continues to move through her practice with a steady, open rhythm. There is no pause, only change. Her work, like her body, holds the quiet complexity of transformation. In this visit, we explore how her materials and her experience of becoming a mother inform one another. How creation, in all its forms, continues. A portrait of an artist in active becoming.

7115: Your work also explores how materials can behave unexpectedly. Has pregnancy changed the way you think about control, either in your studio or in your body?

Emilie: Control is a very interesting subject. I don’t think I’ve changed much in that regard. I know. I’m not in control of most things, and I don’t want to be neither in the studio nor in my pregnancy.
I believe my body will do what billions of women before me have done, and I will deal with the struggles as they come. Within the uncontrolled lies the adventure: the exploration of oneself, but also the exploration of materials—new chemical connections that can open up our minds.
I hope I will never be in full control, that’s certain. I think the edge or nerve in most things comes from balancing control and the uncontrolled and that, to me, is life.

7115: Ceramics, like bodies, move through transformation. They crack, hold, expand. Do you feel any connection between your firing process and what’s unfolding internally?

Emilie: There is a resemblance in that process as you don’t know who or what you will get. I’ve practiced patience for a long time in my work with sculpture, waiting for kilns to cool down or for pieces to dry. Ceramics is an extremely slow process, and I fire and rework my sculptures over many months. In that sense, there’s a connection between the two experiences.

7115: You often let form, surface, and function shift throughout your process. How has your own shifting physicality influenced your way of working?

Emilie: It made me realize that I’m not only an artist. I am a creator! Creating is something I love to do, so even if being pregnant isn’t always super fun, I enjoy the excitement of the artwork I’m working on inside. I take care to avoid toxic materials, which is a positive thing, and I’ve also learned that I’m allowed to work for as long as it feels good. The most important thing is to listen to yourself.

7115: You’ve spoken about objects play an active role in our experiences, about them not being passive. Do you think of your own body in that way right now? As something with its own intelligence or resistance?

Emilie: I’m interested in different ways of looking at objects. By active objects, I mean that they have a role to play. I’m interested in examining materials and objects as something that can create greater meaning, almost like a materialist approach.

In “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things” (2010), Jane Bennett argues that all material things—human and nonhuman—possess a kind of vitality or agency that shapes the world around us. It’s not that they are active or intelligent in the same way we are, but that the way we, as humans, act around them creates a kind of active presence. For example, when we choose to walk around an object instead of walking through it, the object can be seen as active because it changes how we behave in its presence.I think of it as if there is something in all objects and materials—human and nonhuman—that isexiting to examining, and that a world will unfold through this attention. Maybe that’s also what makes me human: being interested in finding meaning in things, like an archaeologist uncovering objects from the past that reveal something about the world before us. I see my work as a way to uncover what is already there, telling a story with materials from a different angle, an angle I hope others will find interesting.

Some of my favourite artworks, like Meret Oppenheim’s “Fur-Covered Cup” (1936), use the object in a very simple way to shift our point of view and make us reconsider how we perceive everyday things. For me that’s a masterpiece.

7115: Tell us about your upcoming exhibition—what is it about, and where and when can we see your work?

Emilie: My next project is a group exhibition in Amsterdam in February at Gallery Vriend van Bavink. I will present a series of sculptures under the theme BEACH, inspired by a childhood memory of the seaside. In these works, objects take on an important role, carrying both the melancholy of the past and a reflection on climate change in the future, intertwined with a naïve childhood perspective.

The project is about being torn between the role of objects in reality and in memory, and how their meaning changes over time. It explores how objects shift between past and present, memory and reality, and how they shape the way we perceive the world today. I’m very excited about these new works!

Emilie Bobek’s studio holds a stillness that belies the quiet transformation unfolding within it. Her work resists finality, it asks questions, shifts form, and reveals meaning through patience and attention. As she prepares to bring both new sculptures and new life into the world, her practice reminds us that creation is not always linear or polished. It is slow, layered, and deeply human.

In Emilie’s world, objects carry stories, materials hold memory, and the body becomes part of the work. Whether in clay or in life, something is always taking shape. And sometimes, it’s in the waiting, the unknown, the in-between, where meaning begins to emerge.

Exhibition BEACH, February 2026
Vriend van Bavink Gallery
Oosterdokskade 243, 1011 DL Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tue – Fri 10:00 – 17:30
Sat 13:00 – 17:30

Emilie Bobek
https://www.emiliebobek.com
@emiliebobek