About Ruup & Form

Founded in 2019 by Varuna Kollanethu, Ruup & Form is a contemporary London gallery working at the intersection of art, craft and design. The gallery champions museum-quality work by established and emerging artists whose practices explore materiality, culture and the evolving relationship between fine art and collectable design.

Through a programme of thoughtfully curated exhibitions, commissions and educational events, Ruup & Form provides a platform for artists pushing the boundaries of contemporary making. Each exhibition invites visitors to engage with craftsmanship, experimentation and the stories behind the work.

Current Exhibition

Bodily Inbetweenness: Woo Jin Joo

11 September to 13 November 2026

There is something deliberately unresolved about Bodily Inbetweenness, the first solo gallery exhibition by London-based artist Woo Jin Joo at Ruup & Form.

Bringing together freehand machine embroidery, textiles, ceramics, sculpture and drawing, the exhibition considers transformation, perception and what happens when a form refuses to settle neatly into one recognisable state.

Rather than presenting the works as a sequence of discrete objects, Ruup & Form describes the exhibition as a living environment. Pieces are distributed throughout the gallery, creating encounters that are spatial, intimate and responsive. The experience is less about standing back and looking than becoming aware of how material, scale and form occupy the space around us.

At the centre of Joo’s practice is an interest in things that are still becoming. Bodies, creatures and material gestures hover somewhere between recognition and ambiguity, familiar enough to draw us in but difficult to define completely.

Joo describes these internal, coexisting realities as “innate worlds”, shaped through lived experience rather than separated from it.

It is an idea that feels particularly resonant in a culture so often preoccupied with resolution and the finished object. Here, ambiguity is not a stage to be passed through on the way to completion. It is part of the language of the work.

Making as a form of myth-making

Joo brings together folklore, shamanism and embodied knowledge through a process she calls “myth-making”.

Rather than simply retelling traditional narratives, she reconstructs and reimagines their symbols and stories, creating hybrid forms that exist between bodies, worlds and states of being.

For Bodily Inbetweenness, recontextualised earlier works sit alongside new commissions developed specifically for the exhibition. These include a large-scale textile work informed by lace-making traditions, a modular series of ceramic and embroidered panels exploring formation across different scales and intimate watercolour drawings tracing creatures in mid-transformation.

A sculptural seating work changes the relationship between visitor and artwork again, inviting direct physical proximity and what the gallery describes as a “quiet, companionable encounter”. Elsewhere, the boundaries between object, body and atmosphere become deliberately less certain.

That attention to material intelligence is central not only to Joo’s work but to Ruup & Form’s wider curatorial thinking. The gallery’s approach is rooted in research-led exhibitions, close dialogue with artists and a belief in making as a critical language in its own right.

Bodily Inbetweenness has grown from an extended collaboration between artist and gallery, bringing earlier work into conversation with new ideas and commissions.

There is an interesting proposition here for anyone working across art, craft or design: that making does not necessarily have to resolve an idea. Sometimes its value lies in giving uncertainty a physical form.

About Woo Jin Joo

Woo Jin Joo is a London-based mixed-media artist working across textiles, sculpture and installation.

Her practice explores the thresholds of human perception, bringing together folklore, shamanism and embodied knowledge to reconsider ideas of transformation, ritual and what might exist beyond the immediately visible.

She has exhibited internationally at Untitled Art Fair Miami in 2024, Saatchi Gallery in 2025, Ruup & Form in 2024 and Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam in 2023.

Joo received the Cockpit Bagri Foundation Award in 2023 and support from the Elephant Trust in 2022. She holds an MA in Textiles from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Textiles from Central Saint Martins.

Visit Ruup & Form

Exhibition: Bodily Inbetweenness: Woo Jin Joo

Preview: Thursday 10 September 2026, 6.30pm to 8.30pm. RSVP essential.

Dates: 11 September to 13 November 2026

Gallery: Ruup & Form, 7 Tilney Court, Old Street, London EC1V 9BQ

ruupandform.com

See Ruup & Form’s previous exhibition, The Walls Speak in Flowers.

Explore The House Directory to discover exceptional craftsmanship, makers and brands built to endure. Browse our curated directory and read our latest features for expert insights, events and stories from across the world of design. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay connected, or Get Listed to join our community of makers, designers and bespoke specialists.