Bodily Inbetweenness

What is striking about Woo Jin Joo's work is how strange and familiar it can feel all at once. There is tenderness in it, and also uncertainty. You recognise something, and then almost immediately it shifts away from you. The forms seem to exist somewhere between what we know and what we imagine, as though they are still becoming. The exhibition takes as its subject the boundary between what sits inside a body and what surrounds it, and it treats that boundary as permeable and always under negotiation. As the artist describes 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. Rather than occupying the gallery as individual objects, the works inhabit it. They appear through walls, settle into corners and gather around the visitor. Some feel companionable and almost protective. Others remain more elusive. Two large off white sculptures emerge from the wall. I Hear Things Existing With Me, first shown at Collect, holds the idea from which the exhibition grew, something present in the room and at the same time hiding from view. Us, Sit It Down is completed only when a visitor sits beside it, because it is the in-betweenness created by another body that gives the work its meaning. Between them sits a series of watercolours made from 2021 to 2026, the most immediate works here, going straight from mind to paper. Creatures emerge and lurk in them, almost recognisable as a snake or a bird before something shifts. Around them, embroidered pieces with fluid borders dissolve into the walls they inhabit, forming a landscape of puddles, roots and vines, at times murky and at times clear. Water recurs throughout the practice. It fills whatever it finds and never stays still, and neither do our minds. The ceramics gather under the titles Molascus, A Slow Continuous Formation, Scepter and the Formation Studies. Shells, clams and snails become figures for the contrast between a hard outer surface and the soft interior it holds, with stitched textures flowing out and down to the floor, suggesting more still waiting inside. The presentation also includes new commissions, among them a large scale textile piece informed by lace making traditions and a modular series of ceramic and embroidered panels. 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, conjuring hybrid forms that inhabit in-between spaces and draw attention to what she calls innate worlds, internal and coexisting realities shaped through lived experience rather than separated from it. There are moments in the gallery when the visitor is not certain whether they are looking at a creature, a body, a fragment, or something still in the process of forming. That uncertainty is not a difficulty to be solved. It is the subject. The artist does not ask her audience to resolve these forms, but gives permission to spend time with what cannot immediately be named. 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. The exhibition sits in that space between the familiar and the strange. What we see, what we sense, what has already formed, and what is still becoming.