Yingdi Wu
After the Surface, 2026, ceramic, glass beads, sequins and embroidery thread, 5 x 7 x 8 cm /8 x 10 x 10 cm, NFS
About this work:
This work brings Quanzhou bead embroidery into dialogue with hand-built ceramic forms. The clay is pierced before firing, allowing beads, sequins and threads to pass through its surface. Stitching transforms the ceramic vessel from a closed object into a porous structure shaped by suspension, weight and accumulation.
I developed my bead-embroidery practice in China through long-term study with a Quanzhou bead embroidery practitioner. After moving to London, I began working with ceramics and carried these familiar hand movements into an unfamiliar material. The process does not preserve the craft unchanged. Clay resists the needle, fixes each opening and gives the beads a different weight and vulnerability.
In this work, home is not represented by a landscape or a single cultural symbol. It is assembled through repeated actions: piercing, threading, attaching and repairing. These gestures carry memory from one place into another while allowing it to change.
By bringing two material languages together, the work reflects on belonging as something continually made and remade. Cultural memory is approached not as a fixed archive, but as a living practice that survives through movement, translation and transformation.
About the Artist:
Yingdi Wu is a London-based artist and designer-maker whose practice explores material transformation, cultural memory and embodied experience. With a background in textile design, she works across ceramics, textiles, hand embroidery and mixed-media construction, bringing traditional making processes into dialogue with contemporary materials.
Wu’s work focuses on how craft knowledge can move between different materials, scales and contexts, and how repeated handwork shapes both form and perception. She is particularly interested in how techniques learned through making can be reinterpreted without being reduced to surface decoration.
Wu is currently completing an MA in Designer Maker at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, following a BA in Textile Design at Central Saint Martins.