Between body and material, a slow resonance flows. Through her hands on wool, clay, and wood, Guo Xingyue allows form to emerge in quietness. She does not seek to sculpt with insistence, but follows the rhythm of material and touch, letting every contraction, press, or cut become a language of creation.

Between softness and weight, truth quietly reveals itself.

How did you first encounter wool felt? What made you decide to use it in your creative practice? What is the appeal or significance of wool as a material for you?

I first turned to it during the pandemic, wanting a material I could use at home to make sculptures—something lightweight, and something that wouldn’t make loud noises during the process.
When I began working with it, I was fascinated by how wool fibers tighten and felt: fluffy, shapeless wool slowly solidifies into form, and its soft, fuzzy texture feels very companionable. In the felting process, I don’t add or remove wool; I simply keep compressing it and let the shape gradually emerge.
It began as nothing more than a solitary pastime. Then last year, when Qingbai invited me to join the Soft World exhibition, I encountered many wool-related works—different explorations and stories—and through my little felt figures, I met many Mongolian friends.

Needle felting requires striking the wool over and over again—extremely repetitive, slow work. How does this rhythm influence your creative state or your experience of making?

Thinking and searching as I work is the creative rhythm I’m most accustomed to.
As wool felts and shrinks, it guides me: I follow its changes to find the emerging form and decide how to respond. This slow process gives me a gentle space to react. Wool is not suited to making sharp, precise shapes, which forces me to constantly consider the overall form. If I want to realize an idea quickly, I switch to other materials.

I don’t put any fillers inside the wool, to avoid interfering with the shaping. Sometimes, facing a large mass of wool, the felting is so slow that it feels like the beginning of a long hike—you don’t know how long the journey will take. You move in a general direction, sometimes thinking you’re near the end, but when you stop and look back, you realize you’ve traveled far.
I used to take the wool becoming firm and hard as an important pause—after all, the shape only becomes defined once it hardens. But once the fibers shrink to maximum density, everything ends up with the same needle-mark texture, which feels mechanical and numbing.
Now, I want to spend more time distinguishing the material’s nuances, judging more intentionally when to continue and when to pause. I’ve also experimented with combining molding techniques and wet felting.

Both your wool felt and clay works revolve around the theme of shaping the body. What keeps drawing you back to this subject? What does it mean to you?

This is a question I keep asking myself as well. It may be related to my training—during both my undergraduate and graduate studies, I spent a great deal of time doing life drawing and sculpting the human figure in clay. The “body” appears repeatedly in both sight and touch, and the act of sculpting from life continues to influence how I create.
To me, the body is a simple, direct vessel that evokes empathy. Through it, I can bypass many preconceptions and embellishments, and express emotions that are otherwise difficult to articulate.

You once mentioned that “only through firsthand experience can one develop a unique response to the material.” Do you feel this interaction with materials comes more from bodily and tactile experience, or from a weave of thought and observation?

I think it forms an integrated whole. In the process of experiencing and working, there is both direct tactile engagement and the physical act of shaping, as well as the thoughts and judgments that arise from them.
If you don’t make something yourself, your understanding is often limited to inherited knowledge or preconceived imagination. Even when you do make it yourself, you may still not escape these constraints. What I try to do is stay attentive to the truth of the present moment—my actual sensations and circumstances—and make decisions and take action from there.

When you work with different materials—wool, clay, wood—how do the body’s strength and tactile feedback influence the way you shape a piece? Do these differences bring new understanding?

Switching materials feels like using a controlled-variable method, allowing something constant to reveal itself—almost like discovering my own language.
When I work with materials, I often don’t have a precise goal, and in the final work there is rarely a direct or cleverly engineered correspondence between intention and material. Yet these materials are indeed the starting point: guided by them, I find the work’s ultimate form.
Wool takes shape through felting and contraction; clay is joined and pressed together; wood is assembled, carved, and cut. Their forms are simply the result of wool connecting to wool and expanding, clay mounds pressed one against another, wood fibers preserved or severed—though they may appear like a torso or a face. In facing the tangible forms of materials, sculpture becomes the decision between keeping what exists or altering it. What can it be changed into? Should that change be preserved? Can it be preserved? Working directly with matter often requires dealing with such questions.
Using different media is also like practicing specific chemical pairings—each combination produces a different reaction. I’ve noticed that when the making involves more real confrontation and struggle (I’m wary of “deliberation and polishing,” as they often carry too much calculation or embellishment), the resulting work tends to hold more time and more thought within it.

You’ve said, “One person’s truth is the truth of all people.” What does this mean for your creative practice? How does this “truth” appear in your work?

I encountered this line in Rodin on Art. Taking it out of its original context and combining it with my own experience of life drawing and making, I understand it this way:
In the face of one’s immediate circumstances, try your best to smell, touch, and feel—avoiding preconceived notions in the mind. Handle things with care, record them honestly. Through such an approach, perhaps one can peel away the cluttered or outdated surface and, beyond the specifics of personal experience, reach a resonance that is broader and more enduring.