Artist: Woo Jin Joo

Ruup & Form presents Bodily Inbetweenness, the first solo gallery exhibition by London based artist Woo Jin Joo. Bringing together new and selected works spanning freehand machine embroidery, textiles, ceramics, sculpture and drawing, the exhibition has been developed through an extended collaboration between artist and gallery.

The exhibition unfolds as a living environment. Works are distributed throughout the space, encouraging encounters that are spatial, intimate and responsive rather than purely observational.

At its core, the exhibition explores states of emergence and transformation. Forms appear in process rather than completion, and bodies, creatures and material gestures hover between recognition and ambiguity. These shifting presences invite attention to what Woo Jin Joo describes as "innate worlds", internal and coexisting realities shaped through lived experience rather than separated from it. As the artist puts it, the landscape we build within ourselves is never a fixed thing. It is always forming, always ambiguous, at times humorous, and at times something lurking that wants to come out.

Two large off-white sculptures appear out of the wall. I Hear Things Existing With Me holds the idea from which the exhibition grew, a form emerging into the room while still half hidden from view. Us is completed only when a visitor sits beside it, so the work depends on the in-betweenness that another body creates in its company.

Between them sit watercolour drawings made from 2021 to 2026, immediate works that trace creatures in mid transformation. Embroidered pieces with fluid borders blend into the walls they inhabit, holding puddles, roots and vines that resist identification. Water recurs throughout the practice, filling whatever it finds and never staying still.

The presentation combines recontextualised earlier works with new commissions developed for the exhibition, among them a large scale textile piece informed by lace making traditions and a modular series of ceramic and embroidered panels exploring formation across scales. In Molascus, A Slow Continuous Formation, Scepter and the Formation Studies, the shell becomes a figure for the contrast between a hard outer surface and the soft interior it holds, with stitched textures flowing outward as though far more remains inside.

Woo Jin Joo’s practice brings together folklore, shamanism and embodied knowledge through a process she describes as myth making. Rather than retelling traditional narratives, she reconstructs and reimagines them, creating new hybrid forms that sit between worlds, bodies and states of being. This approach resonates deeply with Ruup & Form’s curatorial ethos, a commitment to research led exhibitions, to the intelligence of making, and to supporting artists in moments of genuine experimentation and growth.

Founded on the conviction that meticulously made works can be engines of change, Ruup & Form has built a reputation for creating the conditions for risk taking and career shaping exhibitions. Bodily Inbetweenness exemplifies this shared commitment, an exhibition shaped through dialogue, trust, and a mutual belief in material practice as a critical language for contemporary art.

Alongside the exhibition, six short recordings with the artist are gathered in the gallery’s Listening Room, where Woo Jin Joo speaks about the works in her own voice. Available at ruupandform.com/listening-room/bodily-inbetweenness