I never intended to become an Artist

If someone had told me a year ago that I would one day call myself an artist, I would probably have laughed.

I was the one who bought art.

That was my place.

My first artwork was purchased during the annual Easter Art Trail in Åhus, together with my father. I still remember the feeling of bringing home an oil painting by Olga Semenova. It cost SEK 5,000 (500 €), which felt like a considerable investment at the time. That painting still hangs in my home today, and every time I look at it, I think not only of the artwork itself but of that day and the experience we shared.

Art was always present while I was growing up.

Not in an intellectual or pretentious way. My parents were never the sort of people who analysed paintings or spent weekends moving from one gallery opening to the next. They simply bought pieces they loved. Our home was filled with art, yet we rarely spoke about it. It was simply there, quietly becoming part of everyday life.

Perhaps that is where it all began.

My sister has always been the artist in the family. She drew, painted and filled sketchbooks long before anyone asked her to. My aunt Anna decorated porcelain with extraordinary patience and care, turning everyday objects into something beautifully unique.

As for me, I never imagined I belonged in that world.

I wanted to become a landscape architect.

School never really saw me. I left feeling rather average, convinced I wasn't particularly gifted at anything. During a work placement at an architectural practice, however, something unexpected happened. In their final assessment they wrote that I should pursue a creative and artistic career.

I didn't understand what they meant.

No one had ever described me that way before. (But they knew. They saw me.)

Instead, I stumbled almost by accident into the web industry during the late 1990s. I joined Framtidsfabriken at the very moment the internet was transforming everything. We were barely in our twenties, underpaid, wildly enthusiastic and completely convinced we were helping shape the future.

I worked with graphic design and client-side programming—what today might simply be described as digital design or UX.

It became the beginning of more than twenty-five years spent working in creative communication.

I later trained as a copywriter, worked in advertising, lived in Copenhagen before returning to Sweden, had children, trained as an interior designer and eventually opened my own interior design shop.

Naturally, the shop was filled with art.

I searched for artists from Sweden, Spain and Italy, always looking for pieces that felt different from what was readily available at home. I loved helping people find artworks they would live with and treasure for years.

It simply never crossed my mind that I might create art myself.

When I eventually closed the shop, I returned to marketing, working both as an employee and as a consultant. Life settled into a comfortable rhythm. For nearly eight years I enjoyed a stable career and a reliable income.

Then everything changed.

Last year I lost my largest consulting client, and with it, more than half of my income disappeared almost overnight.

Oddly enough, I remained calm.

I assumed something else would come along. It always does. I got that positive thinking from my dad. 

Around the same time, I bought myself a Fujifilm camera. My intention was simply to rediscover photography—the medium I had quietly loved for years but never fully explored. I got used to my iPhone.

Then January arrived.

I asked a friend whether she planned to exhibit during the Easter Art Trail.

She said no.

The following day she called me back.

"I'll do it," she said, "if you exhibit with me."

Me?

I'm not an artist.

I don't even have any artwork.

And yet I said yes.

That has always been one of my greatest strengths—and perhaps one of my greatest flaws. I tend to say yes before I've had time to consider what I'm agreeing to.

For three weeks I sat staring at my computer, completely paralysed.

Then I began browsing through the thousands of photographs I had collected over the years.

Something shifted.

Frida Kahlo.

Audrey Hepburn.

Two coffee cups from Broder Jakobs, a café in Lund.

Three photographs gradually became three artworks.

Soon afterwards I rediscovered an old photograph of my daughter, taken several years earlier. It became the starting point for Alter Ego Li—a series through which I began combining photography, digital composition and storytelling to explore ideas that reached far beyond the image itself.

Almost without noticing, I suddenly had six artworks.

Six artworks became an exhibition.

And that exhibition became the beginning of an entirely new chapter.

Today, only a few months later, I find myself immersed in my latest series, The Children of the Dandelions.

Looking back, I can't help wondering whether this path had been unfolding all along.

People sometimes ask me when I decided to become an artist.

The truth is, I never did.

It simply took me nearly fifty years to recognise the thread that had quietly run through my life all along.

Every detour.

Every career.

Every photograph.

Every person I have met.

Every creative choice, even the ones I never recognised as such.

They all led me here.

And perhaps this was the path I was always meant to follow.