Why an Architect Keeps Hand-Carved Icelandic Birds on Her Shelf

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London-based Sigrún Sumarliðadóttir recalls how her collection started with gifts from her parents and became touchstones of her work.

A few years before I left Iceland for my studies abroad, my parents purchased an eight-hundred-hectare farm in the Westfjords, a sparsely populated area in the northwestern part of the country where my family and I would spend summers. They renovated an abandoned farmhouse, and eventually I designed an expansion that turned it into a retreat with an artist’s workshop and guesthouse. It feels like you’re in the middle of nowhere, and it’s an hour drive to the nearest towns, one of which is Hólmavík, which has a convenience store. In the summer, a local man named Jón Ólafsson parks outside the shop and opens his truck, and inside are shelves and shelves of wooden birds.

I think Jón is a retired builder, but he was always making things, including these Icelandic birds carved out of local wood, like birch. He sits in his truck making and selling them. My parents first bought one for me and each of my two siblings when I was twenty-one, and soon the birds started to gather in the house as we were gifted more and more for special occasions.

Photo: ivona chrzastek

I now have thirteen birds that live on a shelf in my house in London, and I like them because they each have their own personality—they are very sincere and have a kind of power, being from Iceland. In our folklore, birds are symbols of things like wisdom and good luck and common as first names. Images of the arctic grouse, the small white bird with black markings, which was the first bird I was gifted and is called rjúpa in Icelandic, appear in paintings and books; it’s part of our collective memory. It also reminds me of family, because it always had a special place as the bird we ate for Christmas dinner.

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Jón’s birds also connect to my work as an architect with my firm, Studio Bua, where we often transform what we find into something with meaning, as we did with my parents’ property. The birds have a magical quality to them, almost like a talisman, and I think it’s because they were made by hand with love and sincerity, but also because they remind me of home.

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