'Celebrate your imperfections' or 'God bless you Jogge Sundqvist'

On Friday Julian showed me his new Schenitzen book and as always I was thrilled to be able to look closely and at length at some of Jogge Sundqvist's lovely and original woodcraft. He has such a beautiful and unique style and his carved decoration is second to none.

What Julian pointed out to me, however, were the number of irregularities and 'imperfections' and the lack of symmetry in a number of Jogge's carved items as well as the decoration. You see, the more carving you do, the more time you spend carving spoon after spoon, holding spoons, looking at, evaluating and meditating on spoon aesthetics and utility, the easier it is to get preoccupied with achieving some kind of unattainable perfection - the perfect design, the perfect shape, the perfect size, etc. And with that obsession comes the further preoccupation with symmetry of carving, out comes the ruler and you measure the hell out of everything, not to mention the heart and soul out of it in the process.

It was so nice to look at Jogge's carving, which is arguably perfect in every way, and yet see that these conventions of modernity are not necessarily adhered to. I'm not suggesting for a second that Jogge's work isn't meticulously planned and executed - I was just reminded of that truth I have heard many times that it can be the irregularity of a piece of work that bears testimony to its hand-crafted nature.

And so, in celebration of my all too often imperfect style of carving, here is my homage to Jogge.

I call it 'spatula in red' - it doesn't get much more imperfect than that - knots and all!