CINDY LIU
Cluster Contemporary Jewellery Exhibitor 2025 & 2026
Cluster Contemporary Jewellery
”AMALGAM” 2026
Cindy Xinyi Liu is a London-based jeweller and architectural designer whose practice moves between the scale of the building and the scale of the body. In 2024, she founded Cinque, a studio dedicated to jewellery and object-making as a form of living archive.
Trained across architecture and gemology, with a career spanning building and urban regeneration projects, her practice is rooted in spatial palimpsest, archival spaces, and the role of material objects in cultural memory. This sensibility carries directly into her making: through casting and metal forming, she transforms natural and cultural relics, antique silk lace and dried botanical specimens, into tangible, wearable pieces, sealing ephemeral moments into the material permanence of metalwork. Her interdisciplinary approach moves fluidly between traditional craft and digital fabrication, with a commitment to reclaimed metals and sustainable processes throughout.
Recent exhibitions include The Invisible Made Visible at Blackdot Gallery during London Craft Week(2026), A Room That Remembers You Back at Warbling Collective(2026), and Traces of Living at Cluster Contemporary Jewellery Fair(2025).
Cindy's practice begins with what histories tend to overlook: the veined surface of a dried botanical specimen, the fine weave of century-old silk lace, the quiet trace of hands that made, mended, and passed things on.
Through hand-carved wax and lost-wax casting in precious metal, she translates these relics into structurally viable metal forms, sustaining their fragility rather than erasing it. Wax is calibrated to minimal thickness; internal supports are engineered to preserve structural integrity while letting precious metal hold delicacy intact. Hand carving embeds the texture of touch, body heat and pressure held in wax, while digital modelling brings spatial calibration that the hand alone cannot achieve.
Lost-wax casting is, at its core, an archival act. The mould holds what the material once was before silver is poured to replace it. What remains is not the original, but its trace, made permanent. Worn, these objects carry centuries of feminine domestic labour into the wearer's daily life, not stored at a distance, but actively carried forward.
Cluster Contemporary Jewellery
”The Living Trace” 2025
Cindy Liu, founder of Cinque, came from backgrounds in architecture and metalsmithing, holding a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Architecture. Her work moves between building-scale projects and intimate material explorations, with a particular interest in sustainable design, material processes, and the archive as cultural memory.
Parallel to her architectural work, Cindy engages in metalsmithing as a way to investigate design on a more intimate scale. In 2024, she founded Cinque, a studio dedicated to jewellery and object-making as a form of memory archive.
Through wax and metal forming, Cinque transforms natural and cultural relics into tangible, wearable pieces—sealing ephemeral moments into the material permanence of metalwork. Each piece evokes new interpretations of memory, activated through the touch of skin. Cinque uses this instinctive, tactile connection to express delicate, transient memories through the warmth of the five fingers—hence the name Cinque, meaning “five.”
Cinque founder Cindy Liu, with backgrounds in architecture and metalsmithing, practises jewellery and object making as a form of memory archive.
The 5 fingers of our hands absorb information and shape our earliest memories of the world. Cinque draws on this instinctive form of communication, translating delicate memories into tangible pieces through the temperature of our 5 fingers—hence the name Cinque, meaning “five.”
Through wax and metal forming, Cinque’s pieces transform natural and cultural relics into the wearable pieces, sealing ephemeral moments into the material permanence of the work. Handmade and cast in London, they create new connections and interpretations of memories, accessed through the intimacy of touch.