One bench, one carver, one piece at a time

I'm Ulf. I carve from a small workshop in Europe, oak, birch, lime, and bog oak older than any village near me. Each piece is one carving: a mask, a deity, a pendant, an heirloom. Once it sells, it is gone. There is no production line, no apprentice, no copy. There won't be.

“My inspiration comes from old mythology and the history of my own people. The art is a part of my life and my passion, and the tradition I'm trying to keep alive.”

How I started

I grew up in a household where the old stories were still told over winter fires, the way my grandparents told them, the way their grandparents told them. There were carved figures on the shelf, on the lintel, in the cupboard with the linen. They weren't decoration. They were how the family marked the year.

I started carving in my twenties, first as a hobby, then because friends kept asking me to make pieces for their houses. I didn't go to art school. I learned the way carvers always have, copying the old work until my hand learned the language, then breaking the rules as I understood them better.

What I carve

Three kinds of work fill most of the bench.

• Masks in the Oseberg gripping-beast tradition, the same vocabulary the carvers used on the ship buried in Norway around 834 CE. Cut by eye, never perfectly symmetrical, always with the same intent: an animal that's also a knot, a knot that's also a binding.
• Deity statues from Norse and Slavic mythology, Odin, Thor, Freyja, Týr, Veles, Mokosh, Perun, Svetovid. I sculpt the form from references in the surviving sources, then I add the small choices that belong only to my piece: which hand holds what, how the cloak falls, where the eye looks.
• Pendants, often in bog oak, wood pulled from peat bogs in Eastern Europe, anaerobic-preserved for thousands of years until the colour deepens to near-black. The pendants I make in bog oak are sometimes carved from wood that was a sapling before the pyramids. That feels worth doing carefully.

The materials

• European oak from local mills when I can find it. Quarter-sawn for the masks so the grain runs the right way along the face.
• Birch and lime for the deity statues, lighter, finer-grained, kinder to detail work.
• Bog oak, the dark, dense, sometimes-8,000-year-old wood. Reserved for pendants and small carvings because it is rare and expensive and unforgiving, you don't get to start over on bog oak.
• Finish: raw linseed oil and beeswax. Nothing synthetic. Two coats, twenty-four hours apart. The surface deepens with age, the piece you own in ten years will be darker and warmer than the one I post you today.

How I work

A single block. A chisel. No power tools, save a band saw for the rough-out. Everything finishing follows by hand. A small statue is two days of work; a large one is two weeks. A mask takes a week, three of it spent on the interlace, which is the part nobody sees and the part that matters most.

I don't draw the design first. The wood tells me where the knots and the inclusions are, and the carving works around them. That's why no two pieces are alike, I couldn't repeat the last one if I tried.