Joyce Lin
BETATESTERS
© Joyce Lin.
For Material Autopsy, her 2023 solo exhibition at R & Company, Joyce Lin astonished collectors and curators with two seminal chair designs that epitomized her cerebral, forensic approach to woodworking. Her Root Chair is a variation from a series originally commissioned by the New Orleans Museum of Art when Lin visited the vanishing wetlands of Louisiana. There she was deeply moved by the “ghost forests,” where cedar stands have been destroyed by brackish water flowing into the marshes, a result of human interference in the ecosystem and climate change. This led to her gathering driftwood from the Brazos River in Texas and the Mississippi River in New Orleans, burning the silhouette of a vernacular ladderback chair into the assembled limbs and, in Lin’s words, “finding a kind of sublime beauty within destruction and loss.”
In contrast, Lin’s Wood Chair is all subterfuge and artifice, wherein the actual plywood structure is hidden under layers of epoxy clay and paint. After intense studies of grain and bark, Lin sculpts her tribute to a species—oak, fir, walnut, ash—in a series that has been acquired by several museums, including Munson in Utica, New York, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Field research and scientific method are engrained in Lin’s practice (she received dual degrees from Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University in Furniture Design and Geology-Biology), and she accompanies each design with detailed drawings and descriptions.
B. 1994, Durham, NC
Lives and works in Houston, TX
CH1467
Joyce Lin, Wood Chair (Ash), 2023, MDF, epoxy, and oil paint. Courtesy the artist and R & Company, photo by Joe Kramm.