Woo Jin Joo Builds Her Creatures From What People Wore Out

EXHIBITIONS · London

Reading time: 9 min

Korean folklore says a dokkaebi is born when an everyday object has been handled, worn out and set aside for long enough to take on a life of its own. Woo Jin Joo builds her creatures from old clothing, worn socks, gloves and cut up IKEA bags, stitched over wire until they stand up unaided. Her first solo gallery exhibition opens at Ruup & Form on 11 September. It does not illustrate the folklore so much as carry out its instructions.

---

Woo Jin Joo sews with the feed dogs down. On a sewing machine those small toothed bars sit under the needle plate and march the fabric along at a fixed rate, one measured step per stitch. Lower them and the machine keeps doing the one thing it is certain about, driving the needle up and down, while every decision about where the line travels passes back to the hands. That division between what the motor supplies and what the person steers runs through every object in Bodily Inbetweenness, her first solo gallery exhibition, which opens at Ruup & Form in London on 11 September and stays up until 13 November.

The show gathers embroidered sculptures, a group of watercolours made between 2021 and 2026, and a large textile built on the logic of lace making. The sculptures are the reason to go. They run from palm sized studies to a figure a metre and a half tall, they are covered in stitched fur, folds and knuckles, and nearly all of them began as something a person had finished with.

Korean folklore says an object becomes a being once it has been used enough

A dokkaebi is not a demon and it is not a ghost. In Korean folklore it is what an ordinary household object turns into once it has absorbed enough human life: a broom left standing in a corner for years, a worn out pestle, a straw sandal, a fire poker. The qualifying condition is contact. The thing has to have been carried, leaned on, used up and eventually put aside. What it becomes is sociable and mischievous, fond of games, fond of wrestling, and inclined to test whoever it meets.

Joo has worked in this territory for years and her titles say so plainly: Hat Dokkaebi, Dusk Dokkaebi, Dokkaebi Feet 1 and 2. What lifts the work past retelling is what the creatures are made from. Her armatures are wrapped in old clothing, worn socks, hats, gloves and cut up IKEA bags, which is precisely the category of object the folklore says is eligible for the transformation. She is not describing the procedure. She is running it.

There is a logic to which cast offs she reaches for. Socks, gloves and hats are the garments that take the shape of a body part and then keep it, so they arrive in the studio already anatomical, a foot or a hand or a skull rendered in cloth. A woven polypropylene shopping bag is the opposite: a flat sheet with no memory of anyone in particular, and one of the most widely circulated manufactured objects a household is likely to own. Putting the two together gives her exactly what the folklore asks for, the intimately used set beside the endlessly replaceable, both worn to the point where somebody let them go.

How Woo Jin Joo builds a body

The making sequence is an anatomy and she follows it in order. First the skeleton, which is wire bent to shape, with rattan cane introduced where a form has to hold a long curve under its own tension. Then the flesh, which is wadding or packed scrap fabric, pushed and redistributed until the volume reads the way a body reads, weight low down and tapering where it should.

Then the skin, and this is the part worth slowing down for. The embroidery is not worked onto the sculpture. It is worked onto a dissolvable backing, a water soluble film that holds the threads in register while the needle builds up density. The finished sheet goes into water, the film disappears, and what comes out is a fabric made of Madeira viscose thread and nothing else, held together purely by how often the stitches cross one another. The support that made it possible has gone. The structure it allowed is still standing. For a show about states that have not settled, that is about as literal as a technique can be.

The evenness belongs to the motor and the line belongs to the hand

Freehand machine embroidery is what makes that density achievable at this scale. With the feed dogs lowered, cloth can be pushed in any direction at any speed, so stitch length becomes a function of how fast the hands move against a needle running at a constant rate. Move quickly and the stitches stretch into something close to a drawn line. Slow down and they pile into a solid pelt. Joo uses both inside a single creature, so a limb can travel from sketch to fur across the length of a forearm.

That range is why the surfaces read as skin rather than as pattern. A stitched mark that thickens and thins the way a pencil mark does carries the same information a drawing carries, and the eye reads variation as life. It is also why these figures hold a room the way Jonathan Baldock’s The Gathering does, by giving a visitor faces and limbs to account for rather than surfaces to admire.

Us is only finished when somebody sits down beside it

The largest work is I Hear Things Existing With Me, made this year in viscose thread embroidery and standing 155 by 53 by 40 centimetres. The title does what the creatures do, placing the speaker among other presences rather than in front of them.

Us takes that further and makes it a condition of the object. It is complete only once a visitor sits down next to it, which means the piece counts a second body among its materials and then waits for one to arrive. The gallery has answered the obvious question about how you are supposed to approach it by printing a single word on the floorboards alongside: SIT. Formation Study I, from 2025, is a smaller thing at 28 by 23 by 12 centimetres. Ardour, made this year, is almost flat at 38 by 59 by 3 centimetres, closer to a relief than a figure. Molascus, A Slow Continuous Formation and Scepter complete the group.

Scale is doing quiet work across the group. At 155 centimetres the largest figure meets an adult somewhere around eye level, close enough that a visitor negotiates with it rather than looks down on it. The smallest studies sit at the size of a thing you would pick up and turn over. Between them the show covers the whole range of ways a person physically relates to an object, from handling it to standing face to face with it, which happens to be the same range the folklore covers.

Watercolours, lace and a room you are meant to listen to

Watercolours dated between 2021 and 2026 hang alongside the sculptures, and the pairing makes sense on the level of method. Watercolour and freehand machine embroidery are both additive, both record the speed of the hand in the mark itself, and neither offers a way back once a passage is laid down. The large scale textile in the show is informed by lace making, a technique whose whole character is that the holes are the structure, which puts it in the same family as an embroidery that has had its backing washed away.

There is also a Listening Room, a set of six recordings made for the exhibition and available both in the gallery and on the Ruup & Form website. They are worth playing before walking round rather than afterwards, because they set the register of the work as company rather than display.

Seoul, Central Saint Martins and a bench at Cockpit

Joo was born in Seoul and raised largely by her grandmother, which is where the folklore arrived from, transmitted the way folklore usually is, by being told rather than read. She took a BA in printed textile design at Central Saint Martins and an MA in Textiles at the Royal College of Art, and she now works from a studio at Cockpit in London as the inaugural recipient of its Bagri Craft Award.

Being the first holder of an award is a particular position, because there is no previous recipient to read the brief against. The Bagri Craft Award was set up to back a maker working with heritage techniques in a contemporary practice, and Joo is a reasonable statement of what that was meant to produce: a Korean oral tradition, a Nottingham and Calais inheritance of lace, and an industrial embroidery thread, all carried on the same object.

She is an Associate Member of The 62 Group of Textile Artists, the exhibiting body founded in 1962 to show textiles as fine art, and she received an Elephant Trust award in 2022. That pairing, a craft studio bursary on one side and a fine art exhibiting group on the other, describes the work accurately. It is made with textile techniques and it is shown as sculpture, which is the same ground that Collect at Somerset House and the current generation of new makers have been steadily widening.

Ruup & Form, and meeting the artist on 15 September

Ruup & Form was founded in 2019 by Varuna Kollanethu to show contemporary craft as collectable work, and giving a textile artist a full solo room is consistent with that. The gallery is at 7 Tilney Court, a short courtyard off Old Street, which is the sort of address you need to be told about before you find it.

A Meet the Artist session runs on Tuesday 15 September from 11am to 1pm as part of London Design Festival, which is the best window for seeing the work with Joo in the room. For anyone building a week around sculpture in London, it sits naturally alongside the Royal Society of Sculptors at Dora House on the other side of town.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The satisfying thing about Bodily Inbetweenness is how little distance sits between the idea and the method. A dokkaebi is a used up object that has taken on a life. Joo takes used up objects, gives them a skeleton, packs them with flesh, and covers them in a skin she grew on a film and then dissolved. The folklore is not the subject of the work. It is the set of instructions.

Bodily Inbetweenness is at Ruup & Form, 7 Tilney Court, London EC1V 9BQ, from 11 September to 13 November 2026.