00:02
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I chose The Female Christ by Lena Adler Petersen and Bjørn Nørgaard, a happening at the Stock Exchange in Copenhagen in 1969, showing Adler Peterson walking naked down the Stock Exchange carrying a cross. There's only her, the rest are men in suits.

00:26
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
It was a rebellion against the fact that men were in power in the financial world, and a comment on the story of the male Christ that we are brought up to believe in.

00:37
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
It did outrage the viewers because of a naked woman. They forgot to ponder what it really was about.

00:44
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
It's about gender discrimination, it's also about religion. It was very provocative, with a political message for sure. And I love it, absolutely.

01:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today our guest is Birgitte Moos, a Danish artist. Welcome, Birgitte.

01:26
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Thank you very much, Tina.

01:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's lovely having you. First of all, you and I are very close friends and have had many lovely moments together sharing thoughts about love, work, and life in general.

01:39
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Absolutely.

01:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You lived in Los Angeles. You've moved back to Denmark and we speak to you from your home in Copenhagen. Would you mind telling our listeners where you are in the world and what your surroundings look like?

01:54
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Right now I'm based in Copenhagen, in the inner city, in an area called Nørrebro, which is a very creative environment to be in. I'm in my apartment on the first floor, with a view over the Jewish cemetery. So I look out into a different world which is almost ancient.

02:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And behind you, you have a painting of your own, I recognize it. Can you talk about that painting?

02:25
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Yes, indeed. It's a new painting from last year. It's about quantum physics and interference patterns. Over the last few years, I've been very much into consciousness and entanglement in regards to environmental issues that we're facing at the moment.This painting, which is abstract, consists of circles that interfere into each other. And it's an intuitive way to visualize something scientific and spiritual. I'm combining these two topics.

03:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I'm in my house in Los Angeles, and I have four pieces by you. One is a big painting, which is a self-portrait highlighting your breasts, which is red and white in its color palette. What is the story behind this painting?

03:25
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
This piece that you have in your home is about passion, of course. It's the portrayal of the female body, which has been a subject throughout art history. The head is chopped off, actually, which could seem a bit morbid, but it's also an expression of being objectified as a woman, being anonymous, where it's only the body and the muse, the female muse for the male artists. And the color scheme might match your nationality as a Dane as well.

04:00
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
And the funny thing is, I wasn't even conscious that it was myself I was painting. It's not uncommon when you — I have participated in croquis, body drawing classes throughout the years in order to learn to draw naturalistically. And it's not uncommon that the artist is somehow pulling on one's own body, nevertheless that the female model does have other different features. It's a subconscious thing, I think.

04:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You lived in Los Angeles for a while. You and I both lived in a Danish community on Ethel Avenue in Studio City. It was like the building in Melrose Place, that popular TV series created by Darren Star. How would you describe this community? And what did it mean to you that you had a Danish community close to you as a newcomer to this huge city, which can be a little overwhelming?

04:59
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Oh, it meant the entire world because it was a welcoming community which created safety and of course it was in my own native language, we could communicate. So it was a, definitely, wonderful landing platform for me. And I really enjoyed it down there because we had so much fun. We were doing things together and exploring Los Angeles.

05:21
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
It was just amazing to drop into this community that looked like it was taken out of a television series, with the Californian style square building, low houses, with a swimming pool in the middle and the barbecue. And just be able to jump out in the pool every morning and have a swim in the sun. I loved it.

05:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, it was really nice. And the people we were living close to were mainly musicians, so it was a very creative community also.

05:54
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
There is also a back story to this. My former upstairs neighbor here in Denmark, in the flat that I still live in, was Joachim Svare, the Danish musician, who also lived in the house. So that was my entry point.

06:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And, by the way, he did the music to Danish Originals!

06:11
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I noticed!

06:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What made you move to Los Angeles in the first place, Birgitte?

06:17
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I got a grant from Knud Højgaards Foundation, a Danish foundation which supports the arts, so I could go on a research trip for one month as a set designer and visual artist. I was interested in observing the pavement and the city. I would research on the streets in Los Angeles, looking into existing buildings as locations instead of that you have to invest a lot of money building sets for film production. So I thought it would be interesting to look into what is a sustainable way of working.

07:01
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
And then at that time I was working in Denmark in the gaming industry, actually, doing visuals for interactive games. And I was sent out on a mission to connect with the head of the digital arts department at the University of Southern California. I had a meeting with her and we got along very well. And she invited me to become an artist-in-residence. And that's why I moved to Los Angeles in the first place.

07:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you lived in the Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles for a while, in an artist community in a big industrial building. How would you describe this place and how significant was this new base for you in terms of creativity in this city?

07:43
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
It was an entire artistic community in a desolated industrial area of Downtown where you didn't see many inhabitants. People were actually scared of being in the area at that time, because Downtown is the financial district and it's desolated at night.

08:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And there were a lot of homeless people.

08:03
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Oh yes, yes, yes. That was actually something I was looking into the homeless population in Skid Row later on. But it was a dream come true. I got so welcomed down there. It was extremely inspiring, first of all, to be surrounded by artists. It's a different way of living in America than here in Denmark where we have the social security network and so on.

08:31
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Everybody's independent over there. You don't have any network or anything that captures you if you fall. So it's a harder, much harder lifestyle. Except from people and communities. And I got involved very quickly over there, in the art scene. They were really welcoming to me. So that was wonderful. I was very productive.

08:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was the art community like?

08:55
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
People were living on the edge. It's a lifestyle where people buy paint instead of food to create. It's a life necessity to create, first and foremost. And also very political. It was activistic in the streets.

09:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What were the biggest influences on you artistically while you were working in LA?

09:15
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
The Land Art movement was really interesting. And also to go out in the desert, for example, the Joshua Tree area and all that, to watch original artworks created by pioneers. And that was actually what I was really into, sensing this place was original. This is where the movements came from, which is very inspiring and of course it gives a totally different insight into the movements and why they create.

09:52
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I was also influenced by street art because there's a massive street art scene in Los Angeles, where artists come up. Well, it's a melting pot. It's a melting pot from all over the world that attracts creative, curious individuals. And that in itself is of course enormously stimulating.

10:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Art critics have spoken about a gold rush in LA recently, with a lot of art galleries opening. What was your experience of the art scene and the gallery scene back then? And what were the shows that you had here like?

10:28
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Downtown Los Angeles, when I arrived, there weren't really any galleries. Downtown LA, the Arts District, was not expensive to live in, so it was really inexpensive to rent big spaces. But there was a movement at that time, because it's also in the gallery scene, what's it called, gentrification.

10:47
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
So the galleries started to move to Downtown Los Angeles and open large scale galleries, because there are so many big industrial buildings, and the square meter price was way cheaper. That was interesting. There was the BOX Gallery, they were showing Mike Kelley and other very famous, top-notch, world-class, well-known artists. And Banksy had a big show in a factory building as well.

11:18
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I found it really easy to get involved in the gallery scene in Los Angeles. And I had many exhibitions. And I think it's a different way. They're very open. It's not a snobbish community. Sometimes it's easier when you move somewhere else where you're not familiar with the way of interacting, it can be easier to loosen up and become oneself, because nobody knows who you are or who you were.

11:52
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
So you can actually become more open as a person because the art scene here in Denmark, the Copenhagen scene, is not very big. Everybody knows each other and I get scared of that.

12:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How are they different, those two worlds, Birgitte, Denmark and LA? You said they are open here. Aren't they open in Denmark?

12:15
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I don't know how it is in LA. I think, in Denmark, at the moment there's a focus on young artists that haven't even finished their education at the Royal Art Academy, for example, in Copenhagen. So, art as business, gallerists and collectors go and look for new talents, and there's an age bias.

12:37
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
If you're 50-plus, then it's like there's an intermission of maybe ten years in the career because you have peaked. And then it'll go really high or there's an intermission. Luckily, at the moment, there's a focus on female artists here, which is, of course, appropriate. We talk on International Women's Day today. So, I like that theme.

13:05
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
The Statens Museum for Kunst collection — there are very few female artists represented out of hundreds of thousands male artists. Nowadays we have a new group of female art collectors because women are now becoming financially independent. Now, women can choose for themselves. So they can invest, and that's helpful for female artists for sure.

13:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned art as business. That's not a bad thing, is it?

13:42
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
It's not a bad thing, but if the focus is on totally new artists that maybe aren't ready, maybe need more time to explore — if you get noticed as an artist, maybe the audience, the buyers, the collectors, they want to know that they invest in something recognizable. That means there's a certain style that one gets discovered for. And then in order to maintain the success, you have a collaboration with the galleries.

14:16
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
So the galleries, they also need to pay their rent and their expenses. So one could get trapped in this path of continuing visual expression, and that could lead to, in my opinion at least, that you cannot really discover or try out different things. And thereby one can lose artistic freedom, because that's one thing, as an artist, there should be an ultimate freedom of expression.

14:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
There was this documentary about Apolonia, who came to Los Angeles and that's exactly what happened to her, that they wanted to commercialize her art.

14:58
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Apolonia Sokol. This male collector in Los Angeles was trying to, let's say, guide her in a certain direction in order to achieve success. She has to do a certain amount of paintings within a short time. So it turns into factory work. And she didn't want to do it.

15:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, no. She rebelled against that.

15:22
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
She's fantastic. I'm a great fan.

15:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Have you experienced something like that? Or seen it up close?

15:30
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I have, I have. I did a series called The Memory Palace. I was experimenting with pressing the black color in itself, and people loved it. They even thought it was done by a male artist. So I felt a bit like I had to continue even though I wanted to do something else. I wanted my freedom to discover different expressions.

15:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So you are still considering artistic expression more important than making a good living? The romantic artist…

16:03
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Well, there is something in it because I read a review, I think it was the Danish review done last year about that. They looked at the Top 100, 1–100, which education is the hardest to get into and which education gave the least financial income. The Royal Academy is the hardest, or in the top three, I think, to get into. But the artist income is in the bottom 100.

16:30
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Many artists live below the poverty limit. Several artists just give up because it's too hard to survive. It's a combination of doing the art and then working on the side for many to pay the bills. And then there's also the issue here in Copenhagen: it's very hard to find a studio. It's big competition, lack of housing, lack of locations.

16:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You decided to move back to Denmark about a decade ago. You packed your suitcase with all your paintbrushes and ideas and moved back home. What made you decide to do that?

17:11
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Well, there were some personal aspects. My plan was actually to come back to LA. But I needed a break. I needed to get back to connect with my family. They were missing me, complaining that I was so far away. And then I just happened to stay here.

17:30
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
And I had some health issues after my return. I got osteoporosis. I broke my arm several times, so I couldn't work, really. I decided to take a second education on top of my education from the Royal Academy in psychology, which I always had been working with. And I decided to go for it and use it in my art practice.

17:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Why psychology?

17:57
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
It was a special branch called positive psychology. It's an offspring of humanistic psychology, but it's also the closest to what is called transpersonal psychology. Which is something I've been studying on my own during my stay in Los Angeles, because that's where it started, this branch of psychology.

18:19
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Art in itself is very often about psychology. It depends on how you work, of course. For me, when I started as an artist, it was a kind of self-expression, where I discovered that I felt really good doing it.

18:33
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I lost sense of time and space, and that's what I am in when I work in the flow state, which is a trance-like state, where you can just go on and work for 12 hours without intermission and forget to eat. It can even become dangerous then. But of course it's a relief because you can compare it with being in the meditative state. It's calming your nervous system down.

18:58
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
It's also a vessel, where I pull on my inner subconscious intuitive information. It's euphoric sometimes. I like to work on more pieces at the same time, and I run back and forth between the pictures, so it's also a physical thing.

19:20
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Also, psychology is about human connection. It can also be about social justice or whatever. It can entail so many different angles of humanity, even if you talk about gender stereotypes and stuff. I think psychology is fundamental. It's about the human mind, functionality, well-being, consciousness.

19:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We just touched a little upon it — It's hard not to notice the disparity in representation of female artists in both galleries and museums, as you mentioned. Why is the art world so terribly far behind compared to other fields when it comes to this?

20:07
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Well, I know that the first female student was accepted at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen back in 1867. But the female role in the art world was always to be a muse, to inspire the male gaze and creativity. As in many other fields, women were not allowed, really, or accepted.

20:32
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
There were so many biases about femininity and female intelligence. I just reread a book by Erich Fromm called The Art of Loving. It was written in 1956. And his point of view at that time is that women were a lower race. And that was in psychology.

20:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Craziness.

20:54
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Absolutely. Insane. Unbelievable. Unacceptable.

20:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Totally. Do you personally feel that it's harder to break through because of your gender?

21:06
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Absolutely. I have experienced many examples of attempts in what they call #MeToo. I have experienced many times that I was welcomed because of my sex, my gender, my looks, whatever. And there were some, if I wasn't into what they expected, then maybe it didn't go further in the direction I wanted.

21:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's a funny way of saying it. When you were a little girl in Sønderjylland, where you grew up, maybe tell us exactly where, did you always dream of becoming an artist?

21:48
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I grew up near Haderslev, Hadersleben, near the German border, actually. I don't know if I always dreamt about being an artist, but I was living out in the countryside most of the time. There were no neighbors, really, so I was left to my own devices and my imagination in nature.

22:08
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
And I ran around in the woods, and imagined the tiny worlds that didn't exist and I created stories and scenography. I was drawing a lot, but I don't remember that I wanted to become an artist. I actually wanted to become an astronaut. My dad was an engineer and he worked with jet engines and stuff, so I was influenced.

22:35
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
My mother, she lived in Copenhagen. I didn't grow up with her, but she was very artistic. She was actually accepted at the Skolen for Brugskunst in Kolding, the national design school, when she was 16. But she wasn't allowed, that's another story about female repression. She was not allowed by her father to study because she should learn to take care of the home.

22:58
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I spent a lot of time in Copenhagen with her. And she took me around to exhibitions, museums and galleries. I thought I should study at university and become more academic, instead of the visual arts. So I got influenced by her. I have said thank you to her.

23:18
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Some years ago, a remote cousin I haven't had contact with for 40 years, asked what I was doing. And I said I'm a visual artist. And she goes, oh, that's not a surprise, that's what you said you wanted to be when you were ten years old. I don't remember.

23:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Interesting. Your mother was creative and she took you around to look at art. Your dad was from the UK, right? Did having a father who's from another country instill in you travel lust or excitement about going abroad?

23:57
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Yeah, because I knew that he was traveling all over the world as an engineer, so he was an explorer in that sense. Even though I didn't have contact with him, at a young age, I knew about him and what he was doing, and I believed that I might have a natural predisposition for the English language. I was attracted to English, and German as well.

24:22
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
He was the type on a yacht or something. He was fancy, and I thought that's an interesting lifestyle. My mom told me, oh, Birgitte, when I was 13, she says, there's three things you must always carry on you: your passport, bank account, and a bikini.

24:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Hahahahaha! A bikini!

24:41
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Because she had plans on my behalf.

24:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's interesting. You have a master's degree in spatial art from the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen. You also studied at the Berlin University of Arts and Berlin-Weißensee Art Academy. How significant has education been to you? How important is it as a foundation to be a creator?

25:12
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
They're a different point of view. My perspective is that it's really a source of inspiration and a place where you can experiment and get better in the craft and in the techniques. For me, it was life forming as an artist. I learned so many things about different artistic traditions from all over.

25:33
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I have so many interests. I need focus, I need deadlines, I need responsibility in order to create. I can't do it on my own. I couldn't at least, now I can. And it also gave me more self-assurance. I was trained in methods, art history, language, and how you look at things. Yeah, it's been very important. I'm so grateful that I've been studying.

26:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And what was the art scene like in Berlin?

26:10
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Fantastic. That was the best time of my life. I lived in Mitte, it was an area that was the former east. But it was also in that area where all the government buildings are. So the architecture is phenomenal.

26:24
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
They're so hardcore, very direct down there. And I was a part of that scene, when I studied in 1995, 1996, 1997 in Berlin. And I was a part of that movement that opened up in Mitte with the gallery scene, which is now very well known and established.

26:43
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
So I was there from the beginning. And that's interesting to me, this thing where I can sense intuitively what's going to happen, and I'm attracted to it, I seek it out. The same thing in Downtown, in the Arts District.

26:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Und du sprichst auch Deutsch?

27:00
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Ja, wunderbar, ich habe in Berlin studiert auf der HTK. Our professor in Germany, in the first lecture, so now, do you want to start studying in Russian or German? I almost fainted because of course Russian would be: I should go home then.

27:20
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
And then at the Universität der Künste, that was all in German, and we were studying the Greek tragedies, that was my focus, Greek tragedies and opera. When you look underneath the surface, you work with archetypes, collective archetypes for humanity. Which also, of course, if you think about Carl Gustav Jung, he worked with archetypes.

27:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You were awarded Multidisciplinary Artist of The Year in 2024. Can you explain to us what multidisciplinary means and what this award meant to you?

28:01
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Wow. I'm impressed you asked that question. Multidisciplinary is when you integrate multiple research areas into one topic. That means, in my case, I pull on my scientific knowledge from psychology and drag it into visual arts. And then, in the visual arts, I've been working on defining what I call interdisciplinary set design, which is integrating multiple art forms into one piece of art.

28:40
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
That could be painting, installation art, set design, digital art, into one piece of art, the audience immersed in the experience and feel that it's interactive. So, then comes on top of this, psychology implemented in the creation, the process of doing the artworks. And that's what they call multidisciplinary.

29:15
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I was working with homeless war veterans in Downtown Skid Row, where I was implementing sociology, psychology, and visual art. So, it's just more disciplines.

29:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What are your major influences these past few years in terms of your art? I know you use science a lot in your art. Explain to us how that works practically, if you can.

29:42
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I did a set design in Los Angeles in 2014, it was called Civilization, where I was pulling on the science of math and quantum physics to generate a set design that has elements from these fields. And I continued to work with quantum mechanics. It's actually a big hot topic right now in the art world, quantum physics.

30:10
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
It belongs to the natural sciences. I like geometry, numbers, and physics. In quantum physics, it's also a field for consciousness development. There are all these experiments about entanglement, where even though two particles are very far apart, they will influence each other on long distances.

30:36
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I think that's very interesting when we talk about environmental sustainability, because if we as humans are instilled with the awareness that we are responsible for our actions, that our actions will influence other people and living organisms, we could actually get aware that we have a much bigger responsibility in our behavior in daily lives.

31:09
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
And I'm also interested in spirituality, the unseen, what you can't prove, the senses. It's like, I think about you, haven't talked to you for a while, and then you call me five minutes later. What's that, you know?

31:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Since you're now back in Denmark and have been there for a while, what do you feel that Los Angeles gave you? What did you take away from LA that was important to you?

31:39
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I learned to become more open, extroverted, for sure, very much— take initiative and not be so scared of being an individual — becoming myself, for sure, more. What I learned was to be myself, I learned to work hard, I learned not to take things for granted, I learned about responsibility. I learned to laugh.

32:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We laughed a lot, Birgitte.

32:12
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Oh, and humor conquers everything, in my opinion. It's the gateway.

32:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Birgitte, my last question to you is, what's still on your bucket list? What do you still want to achieve in your career as an artist?

32:27
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I hope to be able to get my art out in the world. I would like to exhibit in Paris. I would like to look into Berlin again. I would like to have a voice in the world so I can contribute to make this place a better place to be in the global perspective, but also in more intimate spaces as well. I would like to have a big studio.

32:59
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
I'm working on creating a female artist group, where the members should be plus 50. So we work together collectively and support each other, because it would make us stronger and break down the gender gap.

33:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I like that, break down the gender gap. On that note, Birgitte, thank you so much for being part of Danish Originals. We really appreciate that you were with us.

33:27
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Oh, I'm so happy that you asked me to be a part of this. Absolutely. Thank you very much. It's been a big pleasure.

33:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Indeed. Thank you.

33:37
Birgitte Moos Chalcraft
Indeed, Thank you.

33:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Birgitte Moos Chalcraft chose Lene Adler Petersen and Bjørn Nørgaard's Blad fra serien "Den kvindelige Kristus". Børsaktionen 29.5.1969 or Leaf from the series "The Female Christ". The Stock Market Action 29.5.1969 from 1969 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.