About
London based textile artist Deniz Kurdak’s work explores the fragile and ever-changing nature of memory through porcelain objects passed down from her grandmother. To the artist, these objects are more than everyday household items; they are vessels of stories, relationships, and emotional inheritance carried across generations. They also point to a time and place associated with a sense of belonging, safety, and connection.
Through free-motion machine embroidery, Kurdak distorts and deforms these familiar forms while re-examining her relationship to the past. In doing so, she transforms them from nostalgic heirlooms into metaphors that make visible the tensions between belonging and alienation, safety and rupture, and the complexities embedded within relationships.
Kurdak approaches her textile practice not simply as a means of making, but as a site of transformation where personal history and the sense of self can be reimagined. The shifts and distortions that appear throughout her work reflect an understanding of the past not as fixed or absolute, but as something continuously reinterpreted and reconstructed. Memory, in this context, becomes a tool for emotional repair. Repetitive acts of cutting, stitching, and unpicking create space for transforming one’s relationship to the past and for new narratives to emerge.
By bringing the fragility of porcelain into juxtaposition with the soft resilience of fabric and thread, Kurdak makes visible the dualities inherent in human experience. She regards her works as a form of self-portraiture or family portraiture. Rather than depicting physical likeness, however, these works can be read as metaphors for belonging, safety, and the tensions that lie beneath them.
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