Lisa Dengler
y: hey lisa :) can you tell us a bit more about yourself ?
l: i grew up in toronto, canada. i was born in germany, but we moved when i was very young, so i don't really remember anything from it. i have two older sisters. so i grew up in a very feminine energy environment. i was the boyish one, always doing sports with my dad. he also taught me how to use a camera when i was 12 or 13. i remember being always interested in arts. my sister and i used to pass by this property under construction that was by my house, and we would play to imagine what we would do to the inside of it interior design wise. we also had all these magazines for interiors and architecture around us. and my dad had wanted to be an architect but quit. and that’s, i think, most of the reason why i’ve studied architecture to be honest.
y: how did your fashion blogger journey started ?
l: this whole strange journey of becoming a blogger started when i was in high school, i taught myself how to code websites, and i was into graphic design. so i was designing and coding blogs for fun after school. and i swear, i had friends (ahaha), my semester was just three maths and a spare. maths came very easily to me, so i did all my homework in my spare and then i had all this free time. then at some point, i started writing on them. i've always been interested in writing. i also remember during my second year of university, i did my internship in germany, and i stayed at my grandma's house. and to entertain myself there i started a photography project, where you take a photo of yourself every day for a year. that was the first time i kind of really got into fashion photography. then i started taking photos of myself and putting them online. i did that while i was in architecture school for like, five years.
then i finished my last semester and the same day i graduated, i moved to new york to become an ‘official’ blogger. then i got into an agency. that was 2013.
y: what did you learn the most from being a blogger/fashion influencer?
l: i think i learned how to market myself and how to create a business and all the aspects of it as it was not something i learned in school. also how to network, value yourself and how to price things, very business things.
y: when did you kind of realise that you were done with being a blogger?
l: well, i moved to los angeles at some point after living in new york. and a year after that, i started realising that the industry and the people part of it weren't being genuine. as a canadian, i'm very gullible i guess and thought that people were happy and nice all the time. turns out that this is for a reason. the influencer industry is tied with the entertainment industry, and it’s just a very strange world. i’ve just realised at some point that it was not for me anymore. that was around 2017/2018.
y: how did the process of changing your career look?
l: so i knew i wanted to get out of the influencer world but i didn't know how, or like, what would be next, given the fact that i have so many different hobbies and interests. art was honestly never on my mind, because i grew up in an environment where i had to do very academic things and it was not considered as academic at the time. one christmas, in december 2018, my ex boyfriend gave me stone carving classes for a month.
so i took the class in february 2019. it’s funny because he actually wanted to get me ceramic classes but that was much more expensive (and he likes rocks better than ceramics). when i opened the gift i was like, wow, this is so random. it was only once a week for a month but i ended up loving it. i had started to convert this 60 pound piece of stone alabaster and because i didn't know what i was making, it had became much smaller than it needed and a lot of rock went away. you're supposed to try not to waste as much rock as possible. by the end of the month, i was still not finished. so i was like, well, what’s next? i decided to rent an airbnb. i remember it was march for my birthday, and i worked in the garden. i just wanted to keep working on it, but i couldn’t do it in an apartment because it's too loud and dusty. it was not me being like i’m becoming a stone carver, i was just really enjoying doing it and trying to figure out a way to keep doing it on the side.
then i found a shared studio, in new york, in red hook brooklyn, right on the water with a view of the statue of liberty out my window. i remember looking at the water everyday and taking a pic of it, it was just so beautiful. (i love water, i’m a pisces). so i started to explore with stone carving and other mediums such as painting, that was a very fun phase of my life! i kept on buying rocks and making sculptures very slowly. it took me two years to have nine sculptures and create my first collection, released in 2021. luckily, thanks to my instagram community, a store ended buying some of them and then i got clients and so on…
y: that’s amazing! so…what’s next ?
l: exploring other materials, and doing stone carving, as well as other practices. and like once a month, going somewhere renting a house and with a garden working on stuff there. i want to keep making and focus on sculpture. but i just really like objects.
a conversation with artist lisa dengler at the artist residency casa balandra, mallorca, march 2022
https://lisadengler.com
https://www.casabalandra.com
