Jockum Nordström
Storyteller in collage and drawing.
Jockum Nordström makes collages and drawings with folk-like figures, houses and boats. He is also a musician and children's author.
Jockum Nordström was born in 1963 in Stockholm, where he is also based. He is a versatile artist who makes collages, drawings, watercolours and small cardboard sculptures, but he is also a musician and writer.
His pictorial world is easy to recognise. Small people in old-fashioned clothes move among houses, boats, furniture and trees. There is often an 18th- or 19th-century atmosphere, with sailing ships, wigs and country farms, but also modern objects and elements of music, sex and partying. The figures are drawn in a deliberately naive style, and the stories are enigmatic, sometimes humorous and sometimes unsettling.
Collage is his most important technique. He cuts figures and shapes out of paper, paints and draws on them and assembles them into scenes. This gives the pictures a light, fragile quality, as if one were looking into a puppet theatre. He has also built small model houses and architecture in cardboard.
As a children's author and illustrator he is known for the books about Sailor and Pekka, a sailor and a dog, published since the early 1990s. He has also designed record covers and played music in various settings.
Nordström has exhibited internationally, including through the American gallery David Zwirner, and has had solo exhibitions at museums in Europe. He is married to the artist Karin Mamma Andersson. His distinctive blend of folk art, history and dream has made him one of the most admired Swedish contemporary artists.