The Future of Woodworking: Soo Joo
This artist and woodworker creates sculptural mirrors by blending hand-drawn sketches, digital modeling, and traditional woodworking techniques.
When Soo Joo makes a mirror, she begins with “large doodles”—linear-motion drawings of looping, overlapping lines made using her whole arm, not just her hand.
When she has a drawing she likes, she takes it into Rhino, the 3D modeling program, to complete the design. A similar blend of manual and digital techniques pertains in the building process. When using bent lamination, she programs a CNC router to shape the bending forms. After laminating as many as 50 layers of veneer, she joins the parts and then carves the mirror frame to shape using a grinder, rasps, and sandpaper.
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Raised and schooled partly in her native South Korea and partly in the United States, she has drawn motivation and inspiration from both cultures. The rooflines of Korean houses and the hemlines of Korean outfits have shaped her sense of what is beautiful, and the sweeping lines of her mirrors are linked to the traditional Korean ink-painting practiced by her grandmother. Soo Joo’s work also stems from a love of nature that was nurtured during her elementary school years in Delaware, where she “rode bikes and caught tadpoles and fireflies.”
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After studying painting and drawing at art school in South Korea, she attended Rhode Island School of Design, where she concentrated in furniture. She was drawn to furniture because it combined sculptural possibilities with the opportunity “to make work that could live within the home and be enjoyed daily.”
Soo Joo is now back in Seoul, where she works in a shared woodshop and a separate studio space.
Fine Woodworking Recommended Products
Stanley Powerlock 16-ft. tape measure
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