Would Works trains and employs people experiencing homelessness or living in poverty. Located in Los Angeles, Would Works holds a Beginner Builder workshop twice a week teaching sanding, finishing, branding and packaging. Folks who have completed the Beginner Builder workshop move on to the Community Builders Program, where they learn machining, design and furniture fabrication. The resulting products are used in the Beginner Builder workshops and as outdoor furniture for community spaces and supportive housing sites throughout Los Angeles.
Each year Would Works hosts more than 150 workshops offering paid employment to Artisans, people who are referred to the program by employment counselors and housing case managers.
Connor Johnson founded Would Works in 2012 after working at a homeless shelter where he heard, many times over, “I would work if I could.”
For Father’s Day, Would Works is allowing folks to give the gift of opportunity in your dad’s name. When you dedicate a donation to Would Works, simply add your custom message and Would Works will send a thank you note to your honoree’s inbox. With your gift, people experiencing housing insecurity and poverty will be given the opportunity to learn new skills, be part of a creative community, and earn a living wage.
“Spread some love, sawdust and opportunity in honor of Dad.” — Would Works
A friend of mine who has lately begun to keep bees is finding them a great source of new interest. He steals down to his garden to have a look at them whenever he can snatch a moment from his work. It is like peeping into another world, he says, and it sends him back to his work feeling refreshed and stimulated. There are worlds within worlds in this complex universe of ours, and so much of the time we go on our way ignoring everything but our own particular little one. It seemed to me when I was first introduced to his hive on a lovely day in June that his garden must be a bees’ paradise. It stretches away down a hillside, a great part of it left as much as possible in its natural state. This part shimmered with the blossom of late flowering thorn trees, while underfoot were blossoming wild strawberries, trefoil and wild thyme, and through and over it all was the contented hum of bees, little master craftsmen with an amplitude of good material at hand.
•••
It made me feel how much we all need other worlds in times like these, each man according to his own needs or tastes, whether we find it in study, or in some special activity, like woodwork, or like my friend who chanced upon a little world of Nature’s, to find that it lifted him right out of the worries and anxieties of the present. We let so much remain a closed book to us when we come to adult life, whereas as children we found the whole world fascinating. It would be good for us all if we could do so still.
— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1941, excerpted from “Honest Labour“
Jögge Sundqvist (woodworker, teacher, performer, musician and author of several books) and Nina Lindelöf married 12 years ago, after having been together for 30 years. How did they meet?
“Ho, ho! It was rock ‘n’ roll,” Jögge says. “It was lovely.”
There were a lot of parties during those days. “And I saw this wonderful woman and I was so shy, I didn’t even dare to look at her,” Jögge says. “And she started to raise some interest. It was just right, totally right. And it still is.”
In 1992 they moved to the countryside, to Kasamark, about 20 minutes outside Umeå. At the time Nina had been working as a successful costume designer for Umeå’s local theaters.
“But we wanted out from the city,” Jögge says. “We had a daughter, Hillevi, who was 2-years-old, and we wanted her to grow up in the countryside, close to the forest, free.”
They spent two years before they found an 1824 nearly all-original Västerbottengård, a log house with two squared rooms on each side, an entrance in the middle and a little sleeping chamber beside the entrance. They planned to restore it.
Jögge and Nina’s Västerbotten house. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Jögge turned the old barn into a workshop to begin the restoration.
“I didn’t know much about making bigger things, like houses,” he says. “But I was very happy exploring working with logs and the ways of restoring an old house carefully and with respect for tradition.”
A restored baking oven is the main focus of the kitchen. Wooden items such as spoons, ladles and spatulas are natural items in the kitchen inside Jögge and Nina’s Västerbotten house. (photos by Jögge Sundqvist)
They lived in another house on the property during the restoration process. They had a son, Herman, in 1994. After five years, they sold the house they were living in so they could afford to move to the Västerbotten house.
Wille, Jögge’s father, Herman and Hillevi (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
By now Jögge had quit his job at Umeå Central Station, having been headhunted by the craft society to work as a craft consultant, “which I really appreciated a lot,” he says. In addition to working on his own craft he served as a craft consultant throughout Västerbotten part-time, between 1988 and 1998.
Surolle, a Sour Old Man Who Set Jögge Free Jögge approached craft and parenting in the same way his father did, never insisting that his children become slöjders.
“Because then, it would never happen,” he says. “My father was just showing me how exciting it was. He was very enthusiastic – you can do this and you can do that. He was just very engaged when I had an idea. So that was my task when I had kids – to encourage them to have fun in creativity.”
Hillevi, his daughter, enjoyed drawing, and Jögge encouraged that. And he did the same with his son, Herman.
Herman planing with a shaving around his head.(photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Herman with his ship, made in the workshop. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
“We had a wonderful period in our relationship when he was waiting to go to school and he and I had about 45 minutes in my workshop when the rest of the family was already in town,” Jögge says. “And he had a lot of ideas about what to do. And we made wooden ships and figures, whatever he fancied. Because he loved to fantasize and tell stories.”
One of the family’s favorite stories involves Herman when he was about 5 years old.
“I had a customer visiting my workshop and they were pretty upper mid class,” Jögge says. “And I knew that they were probably going to order something pretty expensive so I told my family, ‘I’m going to have a visit and you have to behave, kids.’”
The customers, a couple, came, looked at pictures and were interested in a chair, which Jögge was really happy about. They went back to the house where they found Herman standing in the entrance. The man asked him a question he heard often: “Are you going to be a slöjder, like your father?”
“And then my son, who is very talkable, looked them straight in the eye and said, ‘No. My father cuts in wood but I’m going to cut in flesh when I get old.’ And the guy looked at me like, ‘What kind of crazy kid is this?’ And I looked at my son as I had never heard of anything like this before!’ And then my son finished his sentence. ‘I’m going to be a surgeon when I grow up.’ And he is, he’s becoming a doctor.”
(The couple did, indeed, buy the chair.)
In many ways Jögge’s parenting style is similar to how he approaches his work. By encouraging a union of self-exploration of tradition and wild creativity, he makes room for good, beautiful and functional objects that are also filled with meaningful whimsy.
“My father was a trained furniture maker and that is much more precise and exact,” Jögge says. “But I was much more drawn to the older craft, to the axe, to the knife, to rougher surfaces. So when I decided to run my own business I knew I had to choose what path to take and I didn’t know where I was going.”
Jewelry box. Ash, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Box. Ash, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Book cover box. Ash, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Mirror top. Basswood. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Armchair. Larch, hawthorn, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Chair. Pine, birch, glass. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Box. Ash, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Spoons and ladles. Hook-grown birch. Artist linseed oil paint and raw linseed oil. (photo by Jostein Skeidsvoll)
Armchair. Pine, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
“I like colors. I like rough surfaces. I like carved surfaces. I like tradition. I like the way untrained peasants in the past had a special relationship to the material, how they picked the crooked and bent material in the woods and put it in the design so it was a special design, which I will say was the slöjd design of how things looked based on their traditional knowledge on how to use the knife and the axe and the materials and the joints that had worked for years and years and years. I wanted to go on that path. But I wasn’t sure if that was right,” he says.
When Jögge began pursing owning his own craft business full-time, he created thousands of designs and was sketching all the time. One afternoon he made a stool with a heart-like shaped seat, and three naturally bent legs, almost like they were dancing. He carved quotes and sayings on the top of it, such as “U better dance,” by Prince, and “Rock on!” He painted it bright red and the whole thing had a very traditional rock ‘n’ roll feel to it.
Kiss stool. Pine, birch. Artist linseed oil paint. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Jögge had the stool on the floor of his workshop when Hillevi came home from school that day. He was eyeing it critically, as usual, still unsure of his path. Hillevi had never seen anything like it.
“Who made this one?” she asked.
“At the time, I was really deep into thinking about my grandfather and the craft and my father and what the expression of traditional craft is,” Jögge says. “So I said to her – it just came out of me – ‘Oh, an old guy up in the mountains made this.’ And she asked me, ‘What’s his name?’ ‘Yeah, his name is Olle Olsson,’ which is a very common name in Sweden. ‘He’s a sour, grumpy old guy, Olle Olsson.’ And then she asked, ‘This Olle Olsson, what sort of animals does he have?’ Because we had a goat by then, and we had a rabbit and a cat but she wanted horses and everything else and we said no. ‘Olle Olsson, yeah, he has all of them. He has goats and sheep and horses and everything.’ And she loved naming things, so she asked me, ‘What kinds of names do they have?’ She was 9 years old by then so I finally had to tell her, ‘I’m just playing with you, I’m having fun.’ She just looked at me and said, ‘OK.’ And she ran to the house.”
Jögge continued working and about 40 minutes later Hillevi returned with drawings, “wonderful drawings,” Jögge says. Under them was a nickname, “Sur Olle,” “the Sour Olle.” She drew Olle’s girlfriend, who she named Agnes Södergran, and all of Olle’s animals, naming them too.
“And then I said to myself, I probably need a guy like that,” Jögge says. “I need someone to talk with. ‘Is this good or is this bad?’ An alter ego. So I started playing around with this guy. ‘What do you think about this stool?’ ‘No, it could be a little thinner there. The legs are splaying out too much, you have to tighten them.’ So in one way he was kind of telling me the truth but I was actually telling myself the truth. And what I realized afterwards was I was lifting off the pressure of being a very good, fine furniture maker. I was accepting that I had another path that I wanted to go, more rough, more material based, more traditional based. It became totally clear. That was the reason I needed this guy to help me. Today I think of it all as a way to approach a manner, an artistic vision that was unique and personal.”
Olle Olsson, Sur Olle, engaged to Agnes Södergran. (illustration by Hillevi)
“I used to describe the traditional wall as a very thick wall because in my world, I had so many influences there. And because it’s so thick, it can be hard to jump through. But surolle helped me saw a little hole in that big wall by telling me, ‘You just have to have fun. You have to follow your path. You have to do your own thing here. You can’t be afraid of not doing the right thing. You have to do what you think is right.’”
In 1998, Jögge started his own professional craft business.
“I needed a name for my businesses and it was totally clear it had to be surolle,” he says.
A Never-ending Exploration Today, Jögge’s business stands on many legs. He teaches classes. He gives lectures about craft and slöjd – what it is, the meaning of it. And then he has a show called “Rhythm and Slöjd.”
Rhythm and Slöjd performance, drilling the hole with an T-auger for a shrink box in rhythm to the Chemical Brothers.
“It’s a storytelling performance about 45 minutes long where I make a shrink box live on stage from the very beginning, the trunk of a tree, until it works. During the time I’m making it I’m telling a lot of stories from the craft field. The first five minutes it’s kind of heavy rock music on stage. I then do everything in rhythm. I saw it off in rhythm. I shave it on the shaving horse in rhythm. I drill the hole in rhythm. I carve in rhythm. It is all done very precisely and exactly in rhythm. So that is special.”
Beginning in 2004, Jögge has performed this show more than 30 times, at schools and for adults, at Plymouth CRAFT and Spoonfest, in Sweden, the United States, Japan and Great Britain.
“But my favorite thing to do is make objects,” he says. “That’s the main reason I’m working.” He recently expanded his shop. And lately, he’s been enjoying working on public commissions for the Swedish Arts Council: theaters, Umeå Airport, Umeå University Library, a nature trail, the Church of Sweden, Västerbotten County Council, the Nordic Museum, schools and more.
“Stairway to heaven” ladder in crooked-grown birch. Raw linseed oil. (photo by Jostein Skeidsvoll)
Littefox. Ash and crooked-grown birch. Public commission to Umeå City Library.(photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Västanå Theatre entrance. Pine, basswood. Artist oil color. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Amelia Earhart bench with back. Pine, crooked-grown birch, basswood. Public commission to Umeå Airport. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
“They pay pretty well and they’re a little bigger and so I kind of like that,” he says. “I would say right now I’m finally where I want to be.” His private commission waiting list is currently four to five deep. Clients simply ask for a cupboard, say, and he suggests designs, creates drawings and says how much it will cost. And clients almost always agree.
Jögge’s chip-carving knife, made in collaboration with Kay Embretsen. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Jögge is carving the design on some chip-carving knives the whole time he talks. He’s partnered with Swedish knife maker Kay Embretsen, who makes his own Damascus steel. A local store is selling a kit that contains one of Jögge’s books, a chip-carving knife designed and made by Jögge in partnership with Kay, and basswood blanks.
The beginning of the pandemic was “a total disaster,” Jögge says, as all his classes and lectures were canceled. But, he had just signed a contract for a new book a few months prior.
“The book was my pandemic babe,” he says. “My wife was working from home and I was working from here, just writing the book and making all the objects. I finally had all that time to make an object and realize, ‘This is not good enough – you have to make a new one – this pattern could be even better – you have to rewrite this one more time.’ You know that thing, as a writer, you have to really give it some time? I was able to give it some time, and even some more time in between that.”
Jögge’s newest book, forthcoming in English from Lost Art Press. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
The book contains 16 projects and Jögge made six or seven objects for each project just so he could pick the best ones as featured examples.
“I’m so happy because if I had so much other work at the same time, I doubt the book would have been so good because I wouldn’t have been able to go so deeply into each of the tasks, so to say. You know how it is it – the older you get, you have to have the right feeling for the design, especially the objects you’ve never made before. It has to take some time before you can really decide, ‘Was this good enough?’ So I was happy for the isolation that it actually was. Socially, it was a disaster.”
Jögge’s hope for the future is simple: To still be able to do woodwork as a way to earn a living, “as long as my body tells me it can,” he says. “I had some problems with my hips and I’ve been having problems with my shoulders and elbows. So I have to exercise. I have to go to the gym and do my work there. That’s the only worry I have in the future is not being able to work.”
Nina is a physical therapist who teaches as a lecturer at a local university, so her expertise in this matter helps. Together they enjoy spending time with their grandchild, Lova, who is 3 years old.
Jögge’s grandchild, Lova. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
“The thing that strikes me about having a grandchild – and having children – is that humans are always exploring,” Jögge says. “They want to know about the world. It’s so natural for them. She’s always thinking and raising questions, ‘Why is this?’ ‘Why is that?’ And that’s the fun part in craft – you always have to explore. And then you have to learn to control your body and the tool. And you have to know the material. And you have to find out how people did it in the early days, how they solved problems, and that’s a never-ending story. You can always find new and interesting ways of making things and exploring the world. And that’s what I’m doing. And, of course, it’s a discovery of yourself too, also in an artistic way. You’re exploring what skills you have and what you want to express but also what skills you don’t have and what you need to learn and in a way, what kind of beauty you want to show.”
The Language of Hands “If you find something you like, and it’s fun, and you’re good at it, then you should keep going on that track,” Jögge says. “That is what I see in good, old traditional craft.”
Jögge uses objects made by slöjders from the 1700s as an example. “They wanted to make objects that were nice to use and functional. And they had to be strong and decent. But they also had to have beautiful designs about them. So every time you work with them, everything from a spoon to whatever, you would say, ‘Oh, how nice! This is good work, this is something.’ And maybe you give thought to the one who made it. A way of passing love to the next generation is to make things that they can use for their children and think about the knowledge in the past that was used in the making, and that they had fun in the making and that they also wanted it to have quality. Because for them, it was about quality in the objects and quality in life. Those two things have to go together.”
“The four walls” box. Made using shrink-box techniques. Aspen, birch. 128 piercings. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Ladle. Crooked birch. Artist oil paint and raw linseed oil. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Spoon. Crooked birch. Artist oil paint and raw linseed oil. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Backrest on chair in crooked birch. Artist oil paint and raw linseed oil. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
Six-leaf rosettes on the back of a mobile stand. (photo by Jögge Sundqvist)
This is why Jögge eschews production work.
“If you just make stools and you make thousands of them, after a while, it’s not love,” he says. “It’s just making money. So this is my path: To always put feeling in an object. Because when I feel, I’m satisfied. I don’t know if I’m satisfied all the time with the money I get from it,” he adds, laughing. “That’s the business part. That’s the surviving part. But for me, the main reason is that I want to hand it over and say, ‘Yeah. I’m really happy about this. It has strength. It has function. It has beauty. All the joints are perfectly done and the material choices are well done and it’s something that you can use for more than 100 years and it will be in your family as a treasured object and I’m happy. That’s my goal.”
When thinking about his life Jögge thinks a lot about driving forces: Why has it been so important for him to express himself by working wood traditionally? He recognizes that he’s drawn to its organic existence.
“People were living in a self-sufficient society where they really had to learn all the skills with the knife and the axe and the material they had. And they were trained to do that from 4 years old. So when they were in their 20s, they were professionals I would say, almost, everyone. And some of them wanted to express themselves really well. And they were really good. And you can tell by going to the archives in museums and looking at the stuff. Once in a while you will see something that a person did and it is really, really good.”
And Jögge isn’t just talking about wood here. He’s also heavily influenced by textiles, and the patterns in textiles, especially. When he sees work that someone has poured their heart into, he feels something.
“I can tell I have a friend there, a colleague there,” he says. “We are companions, we understand each other. I don’t know their names but we are still friends. It’s kind of a relief to think about that. A connection of sorts, to generations back. The language of hands.”
Jögge Sundqvist works with hand tools in the self-sufficient Scandinavian slöjd tradition, making stools, chairs, cupboards, knives, spoons and sculptures painted with oil color. “Not uncrafty” is his motto. He’s also a teacher, performer, musician and author of several books. An English translation of his book “Slöjd in Wood” is available from Lost Art Press, and an English translation of his latest book, “Karvsnitt,” is forthcoming. Jögge’s father, Wille Sundqvist (1925-2018), was a prominent figure in the green woodworking movement.
Wille Sundqvist (photo by Mattias Hjalmarsson)
“There was never a word about how I was going to be the one to take care of the tradition,” Jögge says. “Never. My father, I think he just wanted to share the joy, how to form things in a beautiful way, how easy it is to use an axe and use a knife. He was a good teacher and he was very eager to teach. But sometimes, when I was younger, once in a while I’d say, ‘Stop! I want to try myself! Don’t tell me everything!’ He was a trained furniture maker from Carl Malmsten’s Verkstadsskola, so he had his ways. But despite that, he was encouraging.”
Jögge grew up in Luleå, Sweden, where at that time his father was teaching kids in slöjd.
“In Sweden, slöjd is still something that every student has to learn,” Jögge says. “They have to learn how to use materials such as wood and textiles, and the techniques that go with it. Today I wouldn’t call it slöjd because I have another definition of it. But still, it’s a practical way to teach children how to use their hands.”
Otto Salomon (1849-1907), was an advocate of educational slöjd. “He wrote about how important it was for children to learn practical things, to read a drawing with measurements and stuff like that, especially farmer kids and working kids,” Jögge says. “They needed to have that knowledge to be able to be workers in the industrial revolution.”
Jögge has fond memories of his childhood in Luleå, following his father to the school’s workshops, helping him make things and making his own things.
“We had fun,” he says. “And he was eager to do his own things besides teaching and he helped us do our things too. And I loved that. For one thing, it gave me the confidence that everything could be made by hand.”
Around this time Malmsten, who founded two schools, arranged a workshop with teachers in Luleå where they were tasked to create children’s toys made out of wood.
Jögge, 4 years old. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
“It was meant to be a fun workshop where they invented a lot of ideas around woodwork and children’s toys,” Jögge says. “Years ago I saw some slides when I’m 4 years old and I’m sitting on a crocodile on wheels and it has four pieces that are tied together with yarn so it can roll and sway on the ground a little. I’m sitting on it and it’s very roughly axed and carved with gouges and painted with oil colors and kind of sparkling – vivid colors – and I just loved that. And when I saw this picture, something inside me said, ‘Yeah. This must have been an early triggering point there.’ Because I am very attached to folk art and colors. I love powerful designs and rough carved surfaces. That’s why I am into slöjd much more than furniture work. I think it was somewhere there casting an eye over my shoulder – the inspiration started there for me.”
From the Back of a Dragon to a First Knife Jögge’s childhood was filled with art and slöjd. He remembers his father taking him to a film about Picasso at the age of 10. And he recognizes that the environments he lived in were special.
“My mother was very, very skilled in weaving, felting and nålbindning, which is an old knitting technique,” Jögge says.
His mother was also brilliant with color. Jögge remembers dining room tables filled with color samples and his mother eyeing them all day long, observing them in different light for days on end just to pick the perfect shade of red. It’s something Jögge has found himself doing, mixing and fixing paint for hours, trying to settle on the ideal shade.
Jögge’s childhood apartment, 1962. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
“She and my father adapted the Carl Malmsten way of having a home, with handmade things, crafted things,” Jögge says. “The things were fancy and well done, but it wasn’t that we were rich or wealthy. But they were very well designed and carefully made. We lived in a workers’ block, very close to the iron and steel mill in Luleå, not very fancy at all. We had three rooms and a kitchen.”
Jögge and one of his two brothers shared a double-stacked bed in a room that also served as their father’s workshop.
Jögge and his brother’s bedroom, which also served as their father’s workshop. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
Ola, Eric and Jögge in their bedroom/father’s workshop. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
“In their mind, a home should be something very comfortable, functional and cozy and crafted,” he says. “So my father made the shelves and the beds but it was my mother who was the one who had the overall look for making it a home. My father was very oriented in objects but my mother saw how everything should fit together, from the carpets to the windows.”
Wille Sundqvist, Jögge’s father, grew up in a small village outside Bjurholm, with eight siblings. Wille’s father was a farmer who made a special kind of chair from that part of the country and brooms with a natural bent curve and horsetails on the back. On the weekends Wille and his family went to town and sold chairs and brooms for extra income.
Jögge’s grandfather, Arvid Sundqvist, 1961. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
A copy of grandfather Arvid’s broom, with a natural bent handle, made by Wille Sundqvist.
“And that is exactly the definition of handicraft in Swedish,” Jögge says. “Because we have the word ‘slöjd’ and then we have the word ‘hemslöjd,’ which is ‘home craft.’ And ‘Hemslöjden’ is the craft movement in Sweden.”
Hemslöjd, Jögge says, is basically a side business for farmers. “When the industrial revolution started you needed money,” he says. “If you were farming you were self-sufficient and you didn’t have any money so you had to make some things in the tradition that you knew. So they made spoons, brooms and baskets and chairs and all kinds of objects in different parts of Sweden and sold it in the cities and they’d buy a steel bucket, for example, because you couldn’t make one yourself but it was obviously much better than a wooden bucket.”
Jögge sitting on his grandfather’s children’s eight-rung chair with older brother Ola and parents. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
When Jögge was 10 the family moved to Vilhelmina, and his father began working as a craft consultant.
“He was one of three craft consultants in Sweden working for hard materials, wood and metal,” Jögge says. “Before that they had craft consultants for textile work but never before for harder material. So he was kind of a pioneer there, working for the whole county, trying to help mainly farmers who also had a hemslöjd as a side income.”
The craft movement flourished in Sweden in the 1970s and ’80s. As a craft consultant, paid by the government, Wille helped thousands of small farmers get loans from the state, create business plans, design workshops and create sophisticated drawings of everything, from candle holders to cups to butter knives.
Ten-year-old Jögge loved the move to Vilhelmina. “We came from an apartment to a house,” he says. It was 1969 and the town they moved to had about 4,000 people, so everybody knew everybody. As a teenager, Jögge started playing instruments, including the guitar, and he started a band. His life revolved around rock ‘n’ roll and friends.
Jögge’s father was patient. And when Jögge was 15 years old, he asked his father, “Can you show me how to make a knife?”
His father was quietly thrilled.
Wille taught Jögge the importance of finding a good blade, testing several blades out on reindeer antler. The knife was made in parts from reindeer antler and masur, a type of birch, so there’s a special pattern to it. His father showed him how to inlay the silver and sew the sheath.
Jögge’s first knife, 1973.
“It’s great,” Jögge says, holding it while talking. “I use it very, very much. It’s still a favorite.”
The Old Ways of Doing Things
Jögge moved to Umeå in 1978 where he had his own apartment and started to work for the railroad, at Umeå Central Station.
“I started at the tracks,” Jögge says. “When you’re taking apart a train, someone has to stand in between the cars. When the train was disjointed, the cars were pushed off to another train set. When they came in at a speed of up to 20 mph, you had put on the hook when it bumped into the trainset, to put the train together. It’s a very dangerous job. You have to be quick, and you can die if you come between the bumpers.”
Jögge also had a small workshop in a big wardrobe, 3 meters x 2 meters (about 10′ x 6′). Instead of using it for clothes, he built a workbench where he made knives and did some commission work too. In 1982, a friend convinced him to take two years and attend Vindeln, a folk school that specialized in slöjd.
“That totally changed my whole perspective, because we were a group of students who were all dedicated to work in the traditional way,” Jögge says. “We were finding the old ways of doing things by riving wood, splitting wood, following the fiber, using tradition as a woodworking tool. At the time, a lot of people trained in woodworking more like a fine arts craft. But we were dedicated to the old traditional craft, from the 1700s to the 1800s. We had a lot of discussions defining things: Who are we? Why are we doing these things? We had all-night discussions, even arguments. That was the sense of time, and formative to who I am. Beth Moen was in the class above me, and Ramon Persson was another heavy influence. And we were trained in design too – painting, freehand drawing, technical drawing and so on.
Jögge and Beth Moen, 1983.
“As I look upon it now, I found a way of exploring the tradition from a personal point of view, not my father’s point of view. Because I knew how to make a spoon. I knew how to make a knife. That was pretty common for me. But all of a sudden I had people in my age who were dedicated to what they did and I was able to form my own world which wasn’t my father’s world so I finally had my own choices to make.
“I remember I had been there for a week and I called my dad and I said, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, I’m at this school.’ And he said, ‘Wow!’ And he was free-minded by that time. He said, ‘When you’re 18, go out in the world and do whatever you want to do. I care about you but you should feel free to do whatever you want to do. You have to form your own life.’”
By this time Jögge’s parents had divorced, and his mother had moved to Vindeln as well. Jögge lived in her house during the week, and they invited classmates for weekends at his mother’s house, where they had “many wonderful parties and laughs.” His mother was very social and loved young people, Jögge says.
Jögge’s classmates from Slöjdlinjen in Vindeln, 1984, with his mother Maxan in a blue dress with a flower wreath.
While attending Vindeln Jögge continued to work for the railroad on the weekends, and once done with school he went back to the railroad full-time. Later he worked as a train dispatcher with an office at the station and a platform outside where he’d waved to the train drivers, indicating if it was OK to go or not. In 1985, he asked to work half-time. By then he had his workshop, was playing in a popular rock ‘n’ roll band and owned a record company, Jakaranda Records, recording local bands and putting out records for them.
Traditional Craft & Rock ‘n’Roll
Jögge’s first band was Rockvattnä, named after a village outside of Vilhelmina, which roughly translates to “rocking water.” When Jögge moved to Umeå, he formed another band called Favoritorkestern and later Kapten Nemo.
Kapten Nemo
“We were more of a serious Swedish pop band, heavily influenced by the Beatles, the Who, bands like that, but lyrics in Swedish. Very ’80s like. We were playing all the time. Stockholm too.”
Jögge, to the right, playing guitar with his band, Favoritorkestern.
The band had two leads. Jögge played guitar and sang, and they had a bass player who also sang. Both Jögge and the bass player wrote all the songs. They made a maxi single with four songs and a long-playing record. They were on the radio. For two to three years, around 1986 and 1987, they were the biggest band in Umeå.
“It was real fun,” Jögge says. “We had a good time there. In 1992 I finally released a solo record, Människa.”
He continued his traditional craft work, and the combination of rock ‘n’ roll and traditional craft fulfilled him.
Jögge teaching a chair class at Nääs, 1991.
“Doing traditional craft on one hand was lovely because the rock ‘n’ roll world is a very on-the-surface world,” he says. “It’s fun! But when I got fed up with the superficial rock ‘n’ roll world I could do craft and make things that lasted forever. But also, playing a gig that exists for a moment in time is exciting, the power and energy which comes out of it. So I had this kind of dialectic relationship with the fluidity of craft and rock ‘n’ roll. And I liked that combination, the interaction between modern life and tradition. I think I am that type of person who wants contrast and a little conflict in order to have balance in my life.”
Although Jögge no longer plays, he’s still, as he says, “totally addicted to good music.” He has more than 5,000 songs on his Spotify playlist, and he always plays music while working.
The rhythm of the music must match the rhythm of his work. When that equivalency occurs, he feels more power while throwing an axe, he says, and experiences more feeling while doing it.
“But when I carved patterns on knives, I tried to play rock ‘n’ roll but it didn’t work,” he says. “So I tried to look for more repetitive music which gave me some kind of fluency while working. And I found Steve Reich. He’s arty, modern, non-vocal, very repetitive. I found music with small patterns, like Philip Glass. And actually, it was Laurie Anderson who brought me there, talking about these people, Talking Heads was very repetitive but still a kind of ambiance. And I did much better working with that kind of music for patterns and chip carving. So a very profound insight was when I realized it must be a connection between music and body and working.”
In 1994, Jögge set up a big multimedia rock concert called Rockhuvud. He acted as producer, project manager, composer and musician. The performance featured a rock ‘n’ roll band, Komeda, and two craftspeople, Beth Moen and Tryggve Persson, live on stage. They toured throughout Sweden, 40 concerts in all.
Rockhuvud live at Hultsfred festival, 1994, with Bet Moen and Tryggve Persson as slöjders, and the band Komeda playing with Jögge. (photos by Mats Pallin)
“All the musicians and the craftspeople worked in rhythm, instructed by a choreographer, through this whole concert,” Jögge says. “So it has been a real thread in my work – the body, the rhythm, and the work. It’s hard to explain, but the performance was a way of expressing the power of slöjd, both the physical character of the work and the beauty of the shapes and colors.”
Here he quotes the beat poet Jack Kerouac: “Because I am Beat, I believe in Beatitude and that God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son to it.”
“I think it has to do with something about flow,” he says. “One of my favorite moments in the workshop is working pretty hard and sweating all over – when form comes naturally and you don’t even think about it. It just comes there, from the tool, from the material, from your skill. It’s a rhythm, a kind of instinct that is created in that moment. And after that you just look at it and say, ‘What have I done?’ I talked with Del Stubbs about this, about the dancing of the hands. Sometimes you can just look at your hands, and they just work themselves. You don’t even think about it. They just work.
Jögge drilling a shrink box with a T-auger. (photo by Henke Olofsson)
“This is still something that’s true to me. I believe real craft comes from a deeper interaction with your mind and body, obviously with a long knowledge of tradition, materials and technical skill with the tools. When all parts connect and work together, real slöjd comes from my hands.”
Jögge says he realizes now the importance of having one leg in traditional craft and one leg in rock ‘n’ roll, and that both legs contribute to his body functioning in a way that allows the magic of Surolle. (And that’s a story still to come, in part two.)
“To the Best of Our Knowledge” is a Peabody award-winning public radio show “that dives headlong into the deeper end of ideas.” The show has conversations with “novelists and poets, scientists and software engineers, journalists and historians, filmmakers and philosophers, artists and activists – people with big ideas and a passion to share them.”
In today’s episode, Sara talks about being one of the only women in the country making pots and pans out of copper, iron and tin. Nick talks about the craft and wisdom of poet, novelist and environmentalist Wendell Berry, whose philosophy was the subject of a film he recently co-produced, “Look & See.” And Charles, who has roots in Alaska, spoke with Monroe about Dick Proenneke’s life in Twin Lakes, Alaska, and Monroe’s work repairing, restoring and reproducing Dick’s handcraft for 19 summers.
It’s a wonderful, beautifully produced show, and well worth the listen.
