Jenny Linnea Hagström

Jenny Linnea Hagström (b. 1979) is an embroidery artist born in Sweden and now based in Åland. Her artwork stems from a need to understand humanness and the complexities of the human experience as an abstract, ageless self in a mortal, frail body. Through her work, Jenny explores the relationship between that self and body, as well as our place in nature as nature, and our relationship to the soil beneath us, to flora, to fauna, and to each other.

Jenny's medium of choice is hand-embroidery with needle and cotton thread on cotton fabric, often repurposed. Embroidery for her is a slow and meditative creative process; chains of thousands of small stitches create a larger whole, one stitch at a time. Through this practice, Jenny strives to find and sew the threads that connect us, the webs inside us and outside of us, our vulnerabilities, our strengths and our perseverances, beyond the visible and the surface.

‘Currently living with moderate ME, my illness journey has been both through the slow living land of mild ME to the dark depths of severe ME. I became ill in 2003, at the age of 23. I knew nothing about ME at the time, and remained undiagnosed for many years. Over the next 15 years, my illness fluctuated. At times I would feel better, and then it would worsen again. I was never fully functional. I built my life around my home, a bohemian house in the countryside where I unschooled my three children whilst running a small home-based business. I spent my time knitting, crocheting, sewing, and mothering. I became a homemaker: working with textiles, growing a garden, living the simple life that my body could tolerate best. For a few really good years, I was even able to work part-time in a second-hand shop, organise and lead theatre classes, and run creative workshops in textiles and repurposed material. And then I got Lyme disease. My health deteriorated until I could no longer walk more than a few hundred meters, needing to spend a lot of my time in bed. By the time the Lyme disease was diagnosed, I had also figured out about Myalgic Encephalomyelitis on my own and was finally diagnosed in 2019. My ME was now severe, and I spent most of my days lying down, as I could only sit upright for short periods of time. That was when I started to embroider. This was something I could do lying in bed, something that felt worthwhile and gave me a sense of worth and meaning. Even in this very dark time, there was this thing in my life that made sense. Embroidering became a way to silently communicate my pain and isolation, the fear of slipping into a nothingness, of slowly disintegrating and disappearing from the world of the living.

Now, on good days you'll find me in the garden with muddy feet and dirt under my nails and on worse days I'll be lying on the sofa embroidering, knitting, reading, or just recovering.’

— Jenny Linnea Hagström, 2026