Ryenn's Eyes interviewed Jihyun Kim, ceramic designer based in London, on ritual, protection, and the objects that hold a home together 

There are homes you walk into and feel something shift. Not because of how they look. Because of how they make you feel.

A paper charm on the wall. A vessel by the door. Objects of protection that change the feeling of a room without ever asking to be noticed. Jihyun Kim grew up in one of those homes.

Raised by her grandparents in Seoul from middle school until university, she was surrounded by objects that did more than occupy space. Her grandmother brought things into the house with purpose. Protective items positioned at the entrance. Lucky charm papers fixed to the walls. Small rituals woven into the everyday.

"These kinds of small details made the house feel more special, and more safe," Jihyun tells us.

The memory that stays with her most is jesa, the ancestral ritual performed every year. A table prepared with food. The family gathered to invite their ancestors back, to thank them for good fortune, to ask for happiness in the year ahead.

"It was really a happy moment," she says.

That upbringing never left her. It became the foundation of her practice.

Jihyun is a ceramic designer and assistant curator at County Hall Pottery, a ceramic gallery in London. Her work draws directly from the traditions she was raised inside: the Korean belief that objects can carry meaning, offer protection, and hold gratitude. Not only as decoration. As function.

Her series Salty Fairy Ring began with salt. In traditional Korean homes, a ceramic vessel filled with salt is placed at the entrance to protect the household from bad energy. The salt absorbs what should not enter. Jihyun built a vessel for exactly that.

Then there is Teoju, named for Teojusin, the Korean house god who guards the land a home sits on. The piece is hollow. In traditional households, high-quality rice would be placed inside a large ceramic vessel as an offering of thanks to this god. Jihyun designed Teoju to hold that rice. To carry that gratitude forward. The clay is construction clay, earth sourced from beneath London homes, mixed with porcelain, finished in her own gloop glaze. Her secret something. The result of her own material research.

When we ask her to describe her work in three words, Jihyun says: Magic. Sanctuary. Joy.

Earlier this year, Jihyun stepped into a different role: not maker, but curator. At County Hall Pottery, she put together 2126: A Ceramic Odyssey, a group exhibition conceived around a single question: what would ceramic look like in a hundred years?

Her answer was not a warning. It was an invitation.

"I imagined the future to be a biofuturistic future," she says. "Very optimistic. The earth is not ill. Our technology has developed in a symbiotic relationship with nature. This world is full of greenery, and technology that is ecofriendly at the same time."

The space was designed to feel like stepping somewhere else. She used opaque curtains to blur the world outside. She thought carefully about light and colour and what she calls the holiness of the room. She brought together artists whose vision aligned with hers: Toni Losey, Uriel Caspi, Tessa Eastman, Eiair (Hassakorn Hirunsirichoke).

"My strongest aim was to make it look like people enter a different world," she says. "Curiosity is the part I want to trigger the most. I want people to question what other things would look like in the future, not only ceramic."

It is the same instinct that shapes her objects. The desire to invite someone into a different kind of looking.

To make them feel, before they understand.

Jihyun's work exists for people who already know that objects carry more than their surface suggests. That something worn, or placed, or kept, can hold a meaning that has nothing to do with how it looks.

Find Jihyun's work at jihyunkimceramic.com and @kimkim_ceramic