The Objects on My Desk (And the Stories They Hold)
- Liv Hansen
- Jul 7
- 2 min read
There’s a ceramic cup just to the right of my keyboard, filled with pencils — some sharpened to a perfect point, others worn down to their last few lines. I rotate them out depending on what I’m working on. Most days, this desk serves as both a drawing table and a quiet corner for voiceover and acting work, script notes, and emails, with recordings often done beneath a thick blanket to soften the sound.
Above it hangs a painting by my paternal great-grandfather, Poul — a Danish oil painter who later moved to Nice, France, and painted in the studio of his friend, Henri Matisse. I never met him, but the colours in his work feel familiar: ochres, dusty blues, soft coastal light. His work doesn’t look like mine, but it inspires me.
My desk is small (I do have a second workspace for painting), but it holds a shifting landscape: a sketchbook, a few black pens for ink work, pinecones from a walk near Furesøen — a place of significance in my family history.
Sometimes it’s a practical space, where I answer casting calls and export voice files. Other times, it becomes a kind of quiet stage. A scene unfolds in pencil, or a character finds their rhythm in a recorded read. The objects don’t move much. But the stories they help create do.
I’ve worked on film sets deep in the Canadian woods, wandered for miles in flip flops in the Los Angeles heatwave, taken wrong turns looking for casting offices in downtown Vancouver, and carried sketchbooks across London in the rain— and now I live by the Danish sea, in an apartment that feels a bit like a film still. But no matter where I’ve been, I’ve always needed a desk like this. A space that holds the in-between. Not quite home office, not quite studio. Just enough room to do the work.
And maybe that’s enough. If you’d like to see how these quiet spaces shape the work, you can explore some of my illustrations or read more reflections on acting, art, and voiceover on the Studio Notes blog.
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