I Drivhuset (In the Greenhouse), Susanne Ussing, 1980
Susanne Ussing’s I Drivhuset captures the female experience through a towering figure trapped in a too-small greenhouse. The late Danish artist was fascinated by this theme, which she explored extensively through a wide variety of media, from large-scale installations and interactive exhibitions to photography and ceramics. This stirring sculpture was created for the garden of the Ordrupgaard Museum in Copenhagen. It features a vast female figure made from wood, newspaper clippings, and metal chimney vents. She is trapped in a too-small greenhouse, like Alice in Wonderland after eating the size-altering mushroom. After an unprecedented period of time indoors, the claustrophobia and confinement it evokes feel particularly pertinent. (elephant)
See
Happy Sunday, wonder wanderers! This week’s piece stopped me in my tracks, and I have a feeling it’ll do the same for you.
Picture a glass greenhouse, the kind you might find in the garden of an old Danish estate. Inside, something extraordinary has happened. A towering female figure has completely outgrown her shelter. She is enormous. Her form presses against the glass on every side, and her feet appear to push right through the brick floor beneath her.
She’s not threatening. She’s not angry. She just… grew. The figure is rough and textured, built from the stuff of everyday life. She is humble in her materials and massive in her presence. The greenhouse, which was built to nurture growing things, can no longer contain what it started.
I keep thinking about all the people (especially women) who have done enormous work inside small or overlooked spaces. Who grew quietly, beautifully, without anyone holding up a frame around them. Ussing was one of them. Maybe you know someone like that. Maybe you are someone like that?
Susanne Ussing spent her life making art that was ahead of its time. A painter, architect, ceramicist, and installation artist, she worked across mediums with restless curiosity, exploring the female experience, the body in space, the tension between enclosure and expansion. She died in 1998 at just 57, and for many years after, her work existed quietly at the edges of the art world’s attention.
In the Greenhouse feels like a visual riddle. Greenhouses are built to hold tender, growing things, protect them from the cold, to coax them into bloom. And yet here is this figure, far beyond coaxing. She has simply become too big for the structure that was meant to hold her. It’s an image that calls to mind Alice in Wonderland, that surreal, slightly absurd moment when you’ve grown so much the house can barely contain you.
Alice Shrinks and Stretches: Alice Grows Too Big for the House
Something serious and tender lies beneath the whimsy. Ussing was fascinated by what it means to be a woman in a world full of containers: social, professional, physical. Unlike Alice, this figure isn’t struggling or straining. She is simply present in her fullness. The greenhouse hasn’t failed her. Maybe she’s fulfilled it.
Say
There’s something deeply moving about an artist who was herself too big for her era. She was too experimental, too genre-crossing, too hard to categorize, and she created a work about exactly that feeling. Ussing didn’t fit neatly into any box. Her work spans textiles, architecture, ceramics, photography, and conceptual installation. She refused to be one thing. She just kept growing. For a long time, her work remained on the periphery of the art world.
- What are you becoming that’s bigger than the space you’ve been given?
- Have you experienced a shift in relationship dynamics because of your growth?
- Write about a time you felt like Ussing’s figure. Towering, but enclosed. Present, but unseen. And then write about what changed (or what you wish would).
Do
This week, I’m inviting you to make a small, personal version of In the Greenhouse.
- Draw, sketch, collage, or even just write about the container you’ve been living in and the parts of you pressing against the glass. Maybe it’s a role you’ve outgrown. A habit or belief that used to fit and now feels tight. A version of yourself that was useful once but that your hands and feet are pushing past.
- Grab a magazine or old newspaper. Tear out shapes and layer them into a rough figure. Surround it with a small box or frame you draw on the page. Let the figure spill past the edges. You don’t have to be precise. Susanne Ussing built hers out of chimney vents and newspaper headlines.
- Feeling like getting ambitious and messy? Try paper mache!
About Susanne Ussing
Before the internet existed, before Silicon Valley had a vocabulary for virtual space, a Danish artist named Susanne Ussing was already imagining something more human.
Born in Copenhagen on November 29, 1940, Ussing trained as both a ceramicist and an architect. This rare combination gave her work a quality you can almost feel: tactile, spatial, alive to the body. She was drawn to how people move through space, how environments shape emotion, how art can reach beyond a frame and wrap itself around you.
In 1968, she and architect Carsten Hoff formed a collaboration they called Atelier Cyberspace – more than a decade before William Gibson made the word famous in science fiction. But Ussing and Hoff had something different in mind. Their cyberspace wasn’t cold or dystopian. It was warm, responsive, body-centered: environments that could sense and adapt to human presence, spaces designed to make people feel rather than just see. Their Sensory Space installations embodied this vision of immersive environments that invited participation, not passive observation.
Working across drawing, ceramics, installation, and architecture, Ussing explored themes of the feminine, the body, and the unconscious with quiet intensity. Her Spherical Systems drawings (1964-1969) pulse with organic geometry, as if mapping something between biology and dream.
For most of her life, Ussing worked largely outside the spotlight. Her ideas were ahead of their time, and the art world’s recognition was slow to catch up. She died in 1998, still not widely known. In the years since, scholars and curators have begun the long work of recovery, ultimately situating her among the true pioneers of immersive and interactive art, and reclaiming the word “cyberspace” as something she imagined first, and imagined with love.
