2019–2023
Pause, Continuity, and Return
In January 2019, the working structure that had grown around Simply Wood Rings came to an end. After more than a decade of building a studio, developing production systems, working with employees, and producing custom wooden rings at an increasingly large scale, the business closed and the Simply Wood Rings web address was sold.
The transition did not bring the work itself to a complete stop.
Wooden rings, repairs, and individual commissions continued on a much smaller scale under Gustav Reyes. Without the larger commercial structure around them, these projects returned more directly to the studio: one object, one material, one person at a time.
The period was quieter publicly. It was also a period of reassessment.
Teaching woodworking to young people on Chicago’s South Side became one point of reconnection with making. At the same time, the distinction that had developed between the wooden-ring practice and the broader art-jewelry practice began to feel less useful. Both had grown from many of the same questions: how wood could live against the body, how an overlooked material could carry memory, and how an object could become meaningful through use.
By 2022, those strands were beginning to come together again under the Gustav Reyes name.
The years that followed were less a clean break than an interval—a reduction in scale that created room to reconsider what should continue, what could be left behind, and what the studio might become next.
That return would eventually lead back toward experimentation: salvaged materials, digital fabrication, traditional joinery, and a renewed interest in making work without separating technology from handwork or jewelry from the larger material language of the studio.