About
​
​
Deniz Kurdak is a London-based textile artist whose free-motion embroidery explores themes of memory, identity, and belonging. Inspired by personal narratives and objects from her past, Deniz’s work bridges traditional craft and contemporary art. By emphasising emotional repair and reconstruction, her textiles challenge outdated and dismissive perceptions of embroidery as mere women’s craft, highlighting its potential for storytelling and self-expression.
Her practice reflects the dualities of the human condition, such as fragility and resilience, belonging and alienation, truth and deception. Deniz aims to highlight these contradictions and tensions by bringing the fragility of porcelain together with the soft resilience of fabric and thread.
After receiving a BFA(Hons) degree in stage and costume design, Deniz worked as an academic staff member at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (Istanbul). She has also led workshops at other universities and institutions in Switzerland, Turkey, and the USA.
Her work has been recognized internationally, including as a finalist for the 2022 Women United Art Prize and Young Masters Art Prize 2025. In 2024, her textiles were showcased in the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition, and she has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Turkey, Beijing, and the UK.
Currently, Deniz is a resident artist in the Artists Make Space Programme, organized by the Borough of Richmond upon Thames and Orleans House Gallery.
​
​
​
​
Between the Blue and White
Delicate and solemn, we witness images of blue-and-white porcelain liquefying, fragmenting,
dissolving. Before our eyes unfold incomplete landscapes and broken blossoms; scenes distorting
into whirlpools, forms unraveling into an oceanic blue that spills to the very edge of the frame.Embroidered on cotton canvas, Deniz Kurdak’s drawings emerge between dense infill and
resonant voids. In them, presence and absence do not confront each other as opposites, but
intertwine as complementary forces.
Symbol of resilience and fragility, porcelain is a material that remains immutable during its use until a trauma fractures it, altering its form irreversibly. Once fractured, it cannot return to its original state. The fracture and incompleteness become essential to its new condition, revealing that integrity now lies in the possibilities of reconstitution — of what is, and the crossings that have transformed it.
A curious ambassador of the transits between East and West — an immigrant object from its very
genesis — Chinese porcelain arise in the artist's artwork as an allegory of memory. Each stitch in the fabric attempts to capture a time that dilates within a body moving through it with patience. But her gesture overflows, seeps, unable to solidify into a rigid representation.
In a movement of disintegration and reconstitution, immersed in a dreamlike blue and white, Deniz Kurdak´s artwork reveals to us that memory is not static, but a field of possibilities, generated by the tensions between what has already been and what is yet to come — a gesture of constant reinvention. A reminder that the vessel, the homeland, the name, are indeed what they are, but also all the forms that spring up when these concepts rupture, fragment, and reconfigurate themselves.
​​
Paloma Durante, 2025
​
​
​
​​
​
​​
​​​
​​