Lena Widmann

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Your work blurs the boundaries between art, sculpture, and fashion. What inspired you to explore these intersections, and how do you decide which medium to use for a project?

Like most who create, I realized early on that I could draw. But restless by nature, I quickly found two-dimensional work unsatisfying, so I began searching for other ways to give things shape. From a very young age, I felt a strong need to express myself differently from those around me. To turn those ideas into reality, I taught myself to sew. I started making my own outfits – probably looking ridiculous to the outside world – but I loved the power of transforming my appearance through the clothes I created. My sewing experiments became a rebellion against the limitation of my surrounding – a way to reshape not just fabric but my identity.

Textile as a medium has never left me; it’s the literal red thread running through my life. Over the years, I’ve designed and created clothing, accessories, shoes, lingerie and now even art objects out of textiles – it’s the working process that comes most natural to me. There’s something deeply satisfying about turning a flat, two-dimensional idea into a three-dimensional, tangible object—moving from sketch to pattern to something wearable or visually compelling.

I have to admit that I also enjoy challenging the intellectual dismissal of fashion. Fashion tends to be looked down upon, but it’s everything – it defines the relevance of something in a specific moment. Fashion is essentially Zeitgeist, and nothing – not even art – can exist without being relevant to the time in which it’s created and discovered.

Nature and the human body play significant roles in your creations. How do you approach balancing these two elements in your designs?

To me, they are one. As humans, we like to believe we exist beyond nature, but aren’t we just biological outgrowths of this planet, living with a slight delusion of grandeur? The more we disconnect our physical and mental selves, the unhappier we seem to become.

In my work, I visually channel the instinctual, physical side of myself and connect the nature within me to the nature in everything around me. To disrupt this harmony, I like to introduce the unnatural—working with elements women use to enhance their beauty or “civilizing” my plants by potting them. It’s a deliberate clash: a forceful imposition of civilization onto nature.

You draw inspiration from 20th-century female surrealists. Could you share how their works influence your creative process?

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a work by Leonor Fini – an illustration for a book called L’Étranger (The Strangers) filled with drawings of animalistic creatures, many of them clearly rooted in femininity. I became fascinated by how differently Fini, as a woman, depicted other women compared to her male surrealist contemporaries, who often relegated women to mere decorative elements in their compositions. It’s a perfect example of the “male gaze” we’re so accustomed to in art: men drawing women from the outside looking in.

As I explored the works of female surrealists more deeply, I noticed how they worked from the inside out, capturing a perspective that felt far more natural to me. In their art, beauty becomes less important – or is used only as an ironic standard to be challenged – and there’s an honesty I could truly connect with. For instance, in Unica Zürn’s monstrous doodles, you feel raw pain, while in the dreamlike worlds of Bele Bachem, there’s an unmistakable sense of pleasure.

Without starting to collect the drawings of these women, I don’t think I would have dared to begin my own artistic process. Their works opened a door for me, showing that art could be both deeply personal and profoundly surreal.

Your textile sculptures are both surreal and tactile. How do you think the sense of touch enhances the audience’s experience of your art?

In contrast to the general ‘do not touch’ rule of art, my textile flowers are soft and delicate. The silk they’re crafted from captures the exciting tactility of real flowers, making them feel inviting to touch.

For me, the idea of touch is deeply vulnerable – it strips us bare. Even a visual suggestion of touch can evoke discomfort or fear.

In my upcoming projects, I aim to invite the audience even closer. I’m working on a much larger, interactive installation that will not only engage touch but also incorporate other sensory experiences, creating an immersive encounter.

The female body in moments of vulnerability is a recurring theme in your work. How do you navigate the fine line between sensuality and surrealism in your designs?

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with what people typically call reality, because most of my youth has been defined by experiences you could call rather surreal. Since the age of 16, I’ve been living with epilepsy – though I’ve been incredibly lucky to be seizure-free for over 10 years now. This condition added a strange layer of absurdity to my life. With major seizures and absences coming and going, I would frequently slip away from what most agree is reality, into moments that were both terrifying and mind-bending. These experiences felt like a rollercoaster ride, adding unexpected color and unlocking doors to parts of myself that might have been better left untouched.

Opening yourself up to the surreal inside you inherently involves both sensuality and vulnerability. It allows access to a deeply personal, hyper-individual world – a perspective that can differ from the one society collectively agrees upon.

The one thing that always brought me back and grounded me was my physical being – when you feel you’re real. It was only natural to channel that connection into my sculptures, blending these fragmented elements of self into something tangible and whole.

As a designer and a serial entrepreneur, how do you balance the commercial aspects of your work with your artistic expression?

Every creative project I take on starts with a clear goal: understanding who it serves and sketching out a roadmap to get there. The approach I use is always the same, but the goals differ. While my goal with creating sculptures is purely egocentric – I need to get the ideas out – my aim with a commercial design project is often more practical and connected to goals and deliverables.

In my daily work as a design manager for a large fashion brand and when working on a commercial collection, the biggest challenge is balancing a consistent brand identity with figuring out what the customer will want, rather than simply repeating what they’ve wanted in the past. It’s a subtle process that requires a lot of fine-tuning and gradual changes, but I enjoy the challenge of setting myself aside to create a collection that’s right for someone else.

With my independent design projects, like my nightwear and lingerie brand Lenagerie, the boundaries are looser, but they still exist. Getting the right fit and sustainable fabrications for many different body types and needs, working with premium European manufacturers to produce in small quantities, and still achieving affordable designs are all challenges that require creative solutions.

Design, with its focus on functionality, grounds me and connects me to the world, while art gives me the freedom to connect with myself.

If you could collaborate with any artist, past or present, who would it be and why?

That’s a tough question! To narrow it down, I’ll choose a living artist: a few years ago I’ve discovered the work of Colette Justine, a performance and world-building artist, and even purchased a lithograph of one of her creations from the 1970s. I’m fascinated by how she transforms spaces using fabric, creating organic, dream-like environments with a unique sense of color. I also admire how she incorporates her own nudity into these scenes and plays with gender rules, making her art deeply personal and immersive. Collaborating with her to transform rooms into womb-like, floral spaces would be an incredible way to make textile art interactive and experiential.

However, if I could go beyond the visual arts, the possibilities would be endless – don’t get me started, as I could lose myself in words as well! For example, I would love to create an interactive space inspired by the emotionally raw yet intellectually sharp writing of the fantastic Sibylle Berg. Connecting her words with tactile, immersive elements would be a fascinating way to bridge literature and textile art in one of her theater productions.