And in this way I have realised many of the dreams I once had:

• I have travelled — and been on a theatre stage.
• Sat across from people in therapy — or around the breakfast table in my B&B.
• Taught. Photographed. Written. Published books — and renovated houses.
• And I found love along the way as well.

Yet whatever the form, it has always been about the same thing — creating spaces where something genuine can unfold. I have worked across different media, but my true material is experience.
My life and what I create are not separate; they are interwoven parts of the same work.

Looking back, it is also clear that:

• I often took the path not yet paved.
• Curiosity usually won over reason.
• My creativity moved in many directions, but always came from the heart.
• My expression is rooted in a Scandinavian sense of light, materiality and simplicity.
• I have worked with images, stories and my own life as a canvas.
• And I have mirrored my own vulnerability in the people I met along the way.

A reader of one of my books once wrote that I managed to arrive like Kraka — naked, yet clothed. It is perhaps the finest compliment I have ever received — and also a rather precise description of my work:
I seek expressions where things can be open and vulnerable, yet held by form. Spaces and stories where simplicity can carry the existential.

However, not all dreams are meant to be captured. Some are like fluttering butterflies — if we chase them too hard, the dust falls from their wings.

In my life too, there have been limitations and challenges that kept me from reaching where I once hoped to go.

I am now retired, which gives me the freedom to work only with what truly calls me — without having to consider whether it is “commercially viable”. It is a huge gift. And I am far from finished learning, venturing into something new, or telling stories about what moves me.

On this site you can follow my current projects, and explore some of what came before.

I hope you feel invited to have a look around — and perhaps recognise something vulnerable in yourself along the way.

All the best,
Sannie

Sannie Teresa Burén, b. 1964. The short bio?