I’m Josephine Thornander, a Swedish artist and designer working across modalities.

After 13 years as a consultant and brand strategist, my path has led me back to the Swedish forest. Here, in a 100-year-old barn, I am cultivating a life and a practice centered around a deep love for craftsmanship, nature, and neurodesign. 

My work is rooted in the belief that our surroundings, whether it is your home or your studio, are more than walls, furniture and things. It becomes a living mirror of how you feel: a place that either stresses or heals, supports or hinders you in the work you want to achieve. I believe that a space is shaped not only with the eye, but with the entire nervous system as a compass.

It's not about creating something perfect, but something that makes you breathe deeper.

Creating a breathing space is something I also explore in my artistry through our innate connection to nature, capturing the organic silence and energy that grounds us. Working intuitively with oil and pastels on linen, I move away from harsh realism to embrace a softness where the boundary between the body and the landscape dissolves. 

It is a study of power, energy, and cyclical transformation, filtered through a lens of romanticism.

For enquiries: studio@josephinethornander.com

I was 7, restless with summer boredom, when he handed me all his late wife’s oil paints and told me I could paint whatever I wanted.

This cupboard that was carved into the stone wall served as an oversized mailbox, 10 times the size of any regular mailbox.

I spent days filling that hidden space with a prehistoric landscape of imagined dinosaurs - losing myself in the process, and making the door like a hatch to another world.

Looking back, I realize that was the first time I truly felt the magic of creating something from nothing.

My grandfather kept that painting in his mailbox for another 15 years until he passed, he told me it made him smile every time he got the mail.

And who knows? Maybe the new owners of the house still see it everyday.

A decline in creativity. I didn’t lose my creativity overnight. I kept making art.

But I was repeatedly told it wasn’t something I could live on. That I should be more practical in the long run.

So I became a French pâtissière – because French pâtisserie felt like edible art. Then I became a self-employed consultant within marketing and design.

I choose the more acceptable paths. Because living on what you create was framed as a one-in-a-million pipe dream, the familiar story of the struggling artist.

But creativity doesn’t disappear.

It waits.

Until you find it again. Until you’re ready to go all in on that thing that lights you up.

So here I am, having found it again. I'm making art - again.