Decoding the Visual Language of Embroidery:
Introduction to Minshu’s research:
This showcase presents part of the findings from a practice-based doctoral research exploration of Xiang embroidery from Hunan, China, examining it as both a visual language and a situated way of knowing. Grounded in personal memories and a renewed engagement with this regional craft tradition, the project explores how knowledge of embroidery is generated through the correspondence between body, material and context. By focusing on stitches, gestures and participants’ shared interpretations, the research considers how tacit knowledge, which is difficult to verbalise, can become more visible through the making process. It brings Chinese cosmological thought into dialogue with contemporary debates on the pluriverse, craft knowledge, and technology, repositioning textile craft as a relational process of thinking, communicating, and creating knowledge.
Specifically, the showcase brings together embroidered pieces and visual diagrams from a participatory workshop. Key pieces include the ‘Embroidery Knowledge Relay Process’ and the ‘Double-sided Dialogue Embroidery Experiment’, in which participants observed, continued and responded to each other’s stitched traces. These pieces demonstrate how knowledge can accumulate, overlap, provide guidance and, at times, constrain subsequent decisions.
Alongside physical samples, an experimental short film documents the traces of stitches, gestures and movements in relationships, as well as interactions and changing rhythms over time. Together, these materials reposition Xiang embroidery as a method of thinking through making and as a means of creating design knowledge within contemporary cultural contexts.
About Minshu:
Minshu is a mixed media artist and design researcher undertaking a practice-led PhD in Design at the University of Edinburgh, following a Master’s degree in Textiles from the Royal College of Art. Her work moves across textile production, visual culture, and contemporary interpretations of craft knowledge. She focuses on how traditional crafts influence understandings of affiliation, identity, and cultural relations. Drawing on embodied phenomenology, cosmotechnics and Chinese philosophical thought, she explores how traces, gestures and materials carry tacit knowledge and offer new ways to understand local narratives and human experience from a pluriversal perspective.
Making, Knowing,
and Recontextualising
- Embodied engagement with materials, processes and relationships
- Local narratives, identities, cosmologies and contexts
- Beyond one universal framework of craft, technology and knowledge
Reproduced from Ingold (2013, p. 107, fig. 7.10).
“To correspond with the world, in short, is not to describe it, or to
represent it, but to answer to it … it is to mix the movements of one’s own
sentient awareness with the flows and currents of animate life.
Such mixture, where sentience and materials twine around one another on their
double thread until … is of the essence of making.”
Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.
Situated within a wider visual culture, traditional textiles in contemporary are often encountered through folk art imagery, digital documentation, cultural symbols, branding, exhibitions, and tourist products. These forms of circulation have made craft more visible across institutions, media platforms, and public audiences.
Embroidery in Dialogue
[Transcript of the Video]
This video documents segments from the participatory embroidery workshop, showing how tacit knowledge can be traced through gestures, rhythm, and material responses emerging from collaborative making, which is understood here as a relational flow.
The workshop aimed to make the experiences and creative processes of local practitioners more accessible, while also considering craft as a form of communication. Through collaborative creation, storytelling and contemporary design methods, the workshop explored ways in which traditional craft knowledge could be reinterpreted through shared, situated processes.
Eight participants from a variety of backgrounds, learning paths, social roles and levels of experience took part in the workshop. These included skilled embroiderers, tutors, organisers, art and design practitioners, and beginners. This diversity enabled the workshop to explore how embroidery knowledge is perceived, negotiated, sustained, and transformed across different perspectives.
Workshop: Knowledge Relay Through Embroidery
The pictures show one of the samples and a visual diagram from the Embroidery Knowledge Relay Process. Participants took turns to observe, create and continue the stitched traces left by others, using simple stitches as visual and material cues for shared interpretation. When asked to identify their own contributions at the end of the activity, some participants were uncertain about which stitches were theirs, while others could recognise the stitches of others more clearly.
Workshop: Dialoguing Through Double-Sided Embroidery
This process documents the double-sided embroidery experiment, in which four participants worked in pairs on two upright embroidery frames. Each pair stitched from one side of the fabric, sharing and passing the same silk thread through the textile surface. This arrangement created a state of partial visibility and uncertainty, requiring the participants to pay close attention to how their stitches affected one another through factors such as thread colour, tension, movement, stitch position and rhythm.
These diagrams illustrate how the contributions of the participants accumulated, tended towards integration and overlapped within the limited space of the textile. Each coloured area represents a participant’s contribution, and the areas where they overlap show how their decisions began to influence one another.
- Participants relied on perception and material cues when verbally limited
- Transmission both enabled and constrained later decisions
- The reverse side recorded more hidden processes of thinking and dialogue
As the activity progressed, later participants became more attentive to the existing stitched surface, operating more cautiously and carefully. They responded to emerging shared recognitions rather than interrupting what had already been formed. This suggests that accumulated stitches gradually guided and constrained the subsequent process of creation.
Ultimately, the reverse side of the embroidery took on particular significance as it revealed the hidden traces of the creative process, the thought behind it and the dialogue that often remain concealed by the finished surface.
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