To explain my work for you, I have to build a room for you. A creative room with four walls which represents my boundaries, and actually my greatest freedom. Freedom of expression is not working without limits. Those limits are tools and material but within them I have incredible variety and diversity, and there I can be who I want to be, surolle, the craftsman. My aesthetic expression is formed by these four walls, and now I will describe those four walls. First we have the material wall.
. . . so, as the beat poet Jack Kerouac said, you’ve got to have the right beat to get life, right. Life has to sway and swing and rock and roll and I’m fine with that. It’s a process, you’ve got to have a dialog with the material. When I choose the material for my work wall number two comes in, and that’s tools and tool skills. I just love this surface coming from the cutting tool, a tool inherited for generations, a technique refined for thousands of years, a kind of assembled aesthetic form which is intimately associated with tools and technology.
. . .The third wall is behind me, and that’s tradition. The word sloyd refers to know how to, smart, or do it yourself, DIY and it’s still in our dialect in Västerbotten. It’s the viking age word slög, and it means crafty. But we never say that we are crafty, practical. We always say that we are not unpractical, not uncrafty. . . .And every day I work I am connected with my family’s ten generations of work with wood, furniture and household items and I have a deep respect for their tradition and skills because they knew that they had to live with what they had made for the rest of their lives. This is a sort of responsibility for themselves that they have embedded in the objects they have made., which is about love, about caring to pass on to the next generation.
. . .the three dimensional design was about people. And people, that’s the fourth wall, the folk-art wall. A story about all of you, about the longing, love, desire, incantations, spells and magic which is embedded in the handmade object. . . .So the fourth wall in the creative room is about communication between people, and art and design in traditional crafts is talking directly to the users: Use me, love me, take care of me. Because when I made it, I took care.
Not Uncrafty: A Craftsman’s Definition of Art Jögge Sundqvist, Ted Talk.
A crafty spatial aide de mémoire
