Spells and craft

My beloved friend has teeth that crumble and fall into pieces. I receive the crumbles as a gift, only a few millimeters wide, and I set them in silver to be able to carry my friend with me, around my finger. Some are sharp, some are blueberry-blue or brown. My crumbling friend is so beautiful.

I work with materials in new shapes, with nature, the ground and primordial powers. I work with stories. Below is a necklace made for a fire witch in the project SPRING; a bird skull made of copper, jaw bone from moose and feathers are held together by flax thread and leather.

As a wedding gift I made these magpies and mounted them inside a piece of birch bark. We might be used to seeing magpies as loud, but to their partner they speak with a soft coo, and they mate for life. Clever, brave and big-hearted; these birds from the North made their way to a newly wed coupe in Mocambique.

Give me a lock of your hair.

Body parts can carry a lot of power; I twine the hair of a human and place on it a pearl made of bone from a great forst walker. At the bottom is a slice from an avocado pit – to bind the head to the earth.

I wanted to see if I could bring discarded lab glasses into a context that could be associated with alchemy. Above is a shaved piece of pine that still has its bark, below are wooden legs, painted dark with walnut skin. The glass vials hang on forged mounts and hooks. The object was made as a gift.

Many of the spells are wearable; amulets, that are clode to the body. I relate to what springs from the ground. Many of the kernels and pits I use are stil alive, still loaded with potential, and could grow in the right conditions. It is the potential to life that makes these amulet so special. In other cases they can relate to the past: a disc of moose jaw that once held a molar used to crush solid fibre rests now softly against the chest, reminding of strength in every beat of the heart.

Sometimes the spells are more spontaneous and subtle. These two drums were each a gift to two friends and mentors who both have a connection to Mocambique: one is born there and the other has there their second home. They both live for and spread the music and dance that has its roots in Africa and Mocambique, The drums are two halves of the same avocado pit that was found in Mocambique. Each half is carved as a hollow drum, and inside the skin is the opposite side of the avocado seed. When the drum shakes, the seed rattles around, echoing, keeping the drum alive.

I've worked with the coconut rings since 2018. A mighty and exotic nu, formerly a common material in beautiful corpus objects and discovered by craftists when the nut was brought to out northers countries. Today the shell is no longer as admired here, despite the nut being more available than ever. Light, wood like and durable. I have mostly given different variations of these rings to the people close to me, sometimes with a setting in silver. To work with the coconut shell is always pleasurable and empowering.

Coconut is also very allowing for small settings, as seen below in the ring where an almost nail-shaped fragment of a seashell is set. The fragment has been washed up on a shore by the Indian Ocean and is only a foggy memory of the creature it once was. The coconut keeps it steadily and tenderly against the body.

Where is the proper place for burnt sugar and a visble drill hole? This little frame is made from dicarded pieces of wood where I didn't agree thet they could be thrown out quite yet. The sugar is burnt and partly sucked into the pores in the wood; it reminds a little it of laquer. The edges are barely half a centimeter wide, but he trianular shape still keeps the frame steady.