Meet the Maker Transforming Unexpected Materials Into Mind-Bending Furniture

For her recent solo show at R & Company in New York, “Hypernatural,” Houston designer and maker Joyce Lin crafted seven mind-bending pieces—none of which are quite what they seem. “I am always drawn to things that look like they’re challenging but fun. But sometimes I get in over my head,” she says.

The Wood chair, for example, was made with some wood, but the grain was painted and the bark was sculpted in epoxy clay, while distinguishing cracks were carved into the center of the seat. The piece sits on a patch of “grass,” namely, a latch-hook rug Lin made over the course of a year using raffia she dyed to mimic the look of real grass.

The Surfaces All the Way Down chair demonstrates Lin’s “penchant for dissection.” At a glance, it’s a modern fiberglass design; a closer look reveals the artist’s skill at melding materials—19 of them to be precise—including epoxy clay, 24 karat gold leaf, galvanized steel, and even paper. “It’s the idea that everything can be dissected and understood,” she says, “objects that look like they’re being taken apart, peeled away, or deconstructed.”

Born in Durham, North Carolina, and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Lin envisioned her Kudzu series following a conversation with a curator who suggested she make work about the South. Lin harvested the invasive Kudzu vines to weave around the wood bases of the chair, table, lamp, and ladder, then made every single leaf (the chair has 332, the lamp 162) using a technique she learned from a retired museum model maker. Obsessed with detail, she even hand-painted all the veins on each leaf. These pieces are her “most ambitious to date,” she says. “I’m addicted to the challenge.”

Which may explain why she chose to attend the Brown-Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) dual degree program, where, over the course of five years, she simultaneously studied both geology-biology and furniture design. (Worth noting: her Taiwanese parents are both scientists, specializing in cancer research, but always supported Lin’s artistic endeavors.) “Furniture and geology are really similar in very interesting ways. They are both very hands on,” she says.

Two years after graduating, her work caught the eye of curator Raquel Cayre, a 2020 Galerie Creative Mind, who included Lin’s Exploded chair—a clear plexiglass example with wooden parts inside—in “Chairs Beyond Right and Wrong,” a group show at R & Company, which has represented Lin since 2021. The edition of eight sold out in less than a week. Her work is now in the collections of the RISD Museum, City of Houston Civic Art Collection, New Orleans Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Lin teaches woodworking at TXRX Labs in Houston and furniture design at RISD, where she regularly espouses an 80-20 rule to her students. “I think every piece ideally should be 80 percent known but 20 percent unknown. It means the piece can be realized, but you’re always pushing yourself each step, because that 20 percent is what motivates you to finish the project. You have the curiosity that you want to see this thing exist in real life.”

 With the R & Company show in the proverbial rear-view mirror, Lin is looking forward to “giving myself the chance to play around again,” in her studio, without the pressure of deadlines. She’s hoping to make time for more reading and more research. No doubt some making will seep in as well. “There is something so calming about being in the flow of work, it serves the body and mind so well,” she muses, adding, “making things with my hands is my way of understanding the world.”