Gemmi Goods
Ancestral diasporic Korean wood craft
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“I love wood,” I wrote in my sketchbook.
I had finally realized, after a lifelong woodworking practice, that making things out of wood is a joyful and deeply fulfilling process for me. It calms and energizes me. In recent years, it has been one of the most important ways I am reconnecting with my ancestors in Korea – through the sights and sounds, textures and smells of Korean woodworking craft.
Gemmi Goods is my love letter to fellow Korean diaspora. It’s a way to bring these sensations and feelings into our everyday lives, through natural materials, and simple, beautiful designs which incorporate ancestral techniques like 한옥 hanok joinery. Each piece is a (literal) fragment of home, each table a portal to the worlds of our ancestors. It is my honor to create work which may live with you and your chosen family for generations.
Gemmi Goods is not only about furniture. I plan to offer kits, release other home goods, and teach workshops. I also produce small runs of tools for fellow diasporic Korean artists and craftspeople, such as screens for hanji making. Follow my work at @gemmigoods, where I post works for sale as well as in-progress documentation.
– Jeffrey 유 Yoo Warren
In my dreams, part of the healing I wish for Korean people, and especially the diaspora, is to recover and rebuild parts of our traditional ways of living as part of our lives today. In a place (diaspora) where the textures, materials, colors, scents of our ancestral worlds are hard to find, my dream is that each table I craft be a supporting column in a microcosm of those worlds; that these works embody our fleeting, hard-to-find sense of home.
I seek out local wood that tells a story. Sometimes it’s the many moons of knots and the holes they leave as they swirl through the grain like Jupiter’s spot. Each knot is the path of a branch leaving the trunk of the tree in its youth.
In learning how our ancestors in Korea built homes, I’ve learned how the grain wrapped around each column shrinks over time, cracking and revealing their insides like a ripe fruit. Our homes were designed around this living movement, and such cracks or “checks” are natural and stable; I saw them in century-old columns in Korea. Learning to craft furniture around this kind of movement has been a gift, and I’m proud of the checks and holes and swirling moons in my work.
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