Art out of Scrap: The battle of Olle Jonsson’s sculptures
Tina Kesting
Olle Jonsson?s sculptures of mythical giants Stark�tter, Bock and �nne. Courtesy of Olle Jonsson.
Swedish legends weave haunting tales of H�lsingland, the land of myths and stories. The j�ttar, powerful giants, used their strength to transform the landscape. As a boy, Olle Jonsson was entranced by this folklore. As an adult, Jonsson has called upon the heroes of such legends as inspiration for his paintings, drawings, collages and enormous sculptures. Like the characters from the folk tales, Jonsson?s creations are formed as much from the grit of the land as from the mists of the imagination. Jonsson has become a modern day j�ttar, sculpting his landscape literally and figuratively, as farmer and public artist.
Jonsson’s associations to the land are not dreamt up in a Yeatsian artistic romanticism, but from 15 years of work as a farmer. The 1990s saw a devastating decrease in milk prices in Sweden, and Jonsson realized that he needed a new challenge. He sold his stock, land, equipment and animals and took a year off to redefine his future goals. "I put my previous energy from farming into my art works." Jonsson does not see this creative pursuit as a departure to a discrete discipline, but rather another form of cultivation, "To me, my sculptures are alive."
Jonsson argues that his large sculptural works and his previous duties as a farmer have much in common. He describes the peculiar awareness of weight and space he felt when driving his massive, loan-filled tractor back from the fields–a sensation he now experiences in realizing his sculptures. Jonsson utilizes materials he knows intimately: soil, dust, mud, wood and steel; elements that used to be stuck to his nose day after day in the fields. Jonsson says he is "captured by scrap." As a farmer, Jonsson would visit local junkyards to get material for building a fence for his animals; these days, he uses scrap iron to create raw and powerful sculptures. Scrap iron is the ideal material for his work, claims Jonsson, as it is innately an artistic material–it is made of free, irregular shapes and earthen colors; in a fascinating form of self-alchemy, it changes surface color depending on weather and climate. Unique forms, shapes, and structures have always fascinated Jonsson. "I am a person full of passion," Jonsson says, consistently curious about the ability of elements and organisms to grow and change.
Perhaps it was the influence of childhood folk songs and violin playing–Jonsson says, "I always have music on my mind"–that solidified the legends of H�lsingland in Jonsson’s imagination. The very popular legend of the three giants Stark�tter, Bock and �nne has inspired Jonsson to create his latest extremely large and heavy constructions. The story holds that Stark�tter, Bock and �nne settled at H�lsingland long ago and cruel fights against one another because each of giant wanted to rule the region alone. Stark�tter and �nne collaborated against Bock and killed him. But after their successful siege, they became rivals again. �nne fled from H�lsingland but returned some years later after he had heard of Stark�tter’s death.
It took Olle Jonsson three years to realize his project of the fighting giants. The scrap iron constructions of Bock, measure more than eight feet in height and sixteen tons in weight; �nne and Stark�tter were installed on a mountain in the region and now overlook the small city of Alfta. Jonsson has built these three sculptures out of former water and liquid manure tanks, steal chains and wheels. The resulting constructions, with their uneven surfaces, raw veneers, jagged parts, are reminiscent of Picasso’s cubist works. The body proportions don’t seem to fit together–each has one eye and one ear; the noses seem autonomous organisms. The life the sculptures exists in this tension between the features, this disjunction of parts. These scrap-metal giants are locked mid motion. The rusty tank giants don’t look very dangerous, but rather like friendly and child-like monsters. Jonsson has reincarnated these "anything but friendly neighbors," as they are described in lore, into friendly watch guards of the town.
And for the town, the giants have become local celebrities. After the tremendous success of this installation, Jonsson was invited to participate in an exhibition on modern interpretations of H�lsingland coat-of-arms, the he-goat. It resulted in Barke, an eight-ton scrap iron composition. This animal sculpture was transferred to a public place near the Royal Palace in Stockholm after that exhibition. Here again, Jonsson has injected playfulness into a public space, linking work and myth to create creatures of the imagination.
Jonsson has drawn upon a tale from his own childhood as inspiration for his next project: an extremely large abstract scrap iron sculpture of a potato-selecting machine. Jonsson remembers how proud he would feel when his father, also a farmer, would ask him to help him with the potato crop. A huge machine selected the potatoes depending on their size into different baskets and Jonsson, being a ten-year-old boy at this time, had to take care of the smallest potatoes, which were used as the new seed for the following year. This was an extremely significant experience for Jonsson, a symbol of maturity and growth. He tells this story with a great smile; "I have still the sweet, herbal smell of soils and fresh smashed potatoes in my nose." Jonsson will soon introduce this sculpture to a public space. Perhaps, like with his work Barke, Jonsson’s newest project will tour various locations–introducing the phantom smell of freshly smashed potatoes into city parks; inspiring new generations of Swedish children to fantasize about their mythical past; encouraging strangers to encounter these awesome and comical creatures as characters from a collective memory.
