Junyi Xie
Material Entanglements and Transitions. Exploring sculptural languages that reveal the nature of transience in everyday encounters.
Fine Art Postgraduate Researcher
Supervisors: Dr Andrew Burton and Dr Jo Coupe
Sculpture/Fine Art Practice
Material, Process, and Making
My practice across sculpture, ceramic, dyed textile, painting, and spatial design, explores fluidity, transience, and the poetic potential of everyday life. I work with materials such as acrylic, clay, plaster, latex, resin, plastic, and wax. My work represents colourful, twisted, and illusionistic forms that hover between familiarity and estrangement. Rooted in observation of everyday life, my research and practice seek to explore materials entanglements and transitions, transform fleeting experiences into sculptural forms that suspend function and disrupt habitual perception.
Project Description
My practice-led research project seeking to better understanding our apprehension of material transience within the context of everyday, ordinary aesthetic experiences, I will entangle different materials to form ‘hybrid composite’ sculptures. This project focuses on ordinary matter such as flowing liquids, melting ice, soft textiles, coffee grounds, paper remnants, and discarded objects. Through iterative material experimentation, the research develops hybrid sculptural forms that entangle diverse materials including clay, resin, paper pulp, textile, dye, and found debris. These material entanglements aim to preserve momentary gestures such as dripping, staining, seepage, melting, and drying, translating temporal processes into still sculptural bodies. The project aims to explore sculptural language with the potential of revealing instability, unpredictability, and transformation embedded in ordinary experiences.
Research Interests
My research interests lie in sculptural representations of transient phenomena, material transition, still-life and everyday aesthetics. I am particularly interested in how ordinary materials that often overlooked, disposable, or unstable can reveal aesthetic and conceptual value through processes of change, decay, and transformation. My practice engages with mixed-material experimentation, material entanglement, and the documentation of fleeting gestures such as melting, dripping, staining, and dissolving. It seeks to shape how fleeting motions in everyday can be transformed into sculptural languages, deepening the understanding of transience through the dynamic interactions that occur in mixed-material processes.
I enjoy experimenting with different materials, collecting found objects, and exploring the surroundings to shape emotions, perception, and personal memory in my sculptural practice. I am also interested in drawing, illustration, and zines as exploratory forms of making. I enjoy working with ink to draw, collecting everyday materials, and documenting daily routines. Natural and domestic scenes often inspire my visual thinking and creative experimentation.
