The art practice
Since establishing my practice in 2013, I have moved freely between art, design, concepts and spatial work.
Working across different scales and contexts has taught me to look closely at how we experience our surroundings - how colour, material, proportion, atmosphere and objects can change the way a place feels. Today, art sits at the centre of my practice.
My paintings are rooted in a fascination with nature, materiality and our place within the natural world.
I work primarily in oil and soft pastel on linen, building surfaces through layers of colour, gesture and transparency. Rather than simply depicting nature, I am interested in the feeling of being within it — in the shifting space between landscape and memory, observation and imagination.
The works move between abstraction and recognisable forms. Some begin with something observed in nature; others emerge more intuitively through colour, movement and the physical process of painting. I am drawn to the point where an image can still suggest something familiar while leaving room for the viewer to enter it themselves.
There is a physicality to the way I work. I often build, scrape, soften and rework the surface, allowing the material itself to remain visible. Linen, pigment and gesture become part of the language of the work.
Nature is central, but it is not simply a subject. It is a way of thinking about our relationship with the world around us.
In the Nordics, there is something close to a sacred relationship with nature. The saying and idea that “the forest is my church” speaks to something deeply rooted in the culture I grew up in - a sense of nature not merely as landscape, but as a place of presence, refuge, ritual and connection.
Long before contemporary ideas of nature and wellbeing, the forests and landscapes of the Nordic countries were woven into cultural and spiritual life. Across generations, this relationship has taken many forms - from older pagan traditions and folklore to the quieter, everyday experience of simply being outdoors.
For me, this connection is less about any particular belief system and more about a feeling: that something happens when we step into nature and remember that we are not separate from it. We often position ourselves outside of nature, looking at it as something to observe.
My work begins from a different premise: that we are nature. That remembering this connection can change the way we experience ourselves, and the world around us.
Alongside painting, my wider practice continues to move between art, objects and spatial design. The same curiosity runs through all of it: a fascination with how ideas become tangible, and how the things we surround ourselves with can shape the way we experience the world.
I see creativity as something that does not need to belong to a single discipline.
It can be a painting, an object, a room, a colour, a material or simply a different way of looking.
For enquiries: studio@josephinethornander.com
