Xiaoyi Lin
- Apr 22
- 2 min read
Xiaoyi Lin is a fiber artist who has exhibited in London and China. Recent exhibitions in London include LumiNoir Gallery, Galleria Objets, Espacio Gallery, Elements Contemporary Art Space, and the Royal College of Art. She described her process as working “across textiles, drawings, and photographs, all of which gesture towards the rhythm of time or nature as it is intuitively lived and felt. My projects revolve around the visual and material dimensions of the intangible, discovering the temporal slippages that occur between encounters with different times, places, and surfaces”. Xiaoyi experiments “with stitch, natural dye, and cyanotype. By using the Thames water, nature itself becomes a material…As both process and representation, they are ambivalent images oscillating between the scene and the seen, calling for new modes of attention”.
With a focus on landscapes, Xiaoyi pays careful attention to the pH of water contained within her natural environments. She collects the aqua from these landscapes at different times of the day as well as various weather conditions and strategically mixes them separately with dye which she applies to various surfaces of fabric. These fiber assemblages are usually attached to another like a collage and represent different alchemical reactions to the type of water collected from her observed environments. By directly fusing the natural elements into two-dimensional art, Xiaoyi builds a direct connection to ecology and moves beyond representation and painting by working on fiber surfaces.
Much like an alchemist, her fantastic concoctions derive on the dye being manipulated by the type of fluid, such as rain water, impacting the surface to reflect a unique and impactful interpretation of her environment. These pieces are assembled in a manner which mimics the process of erosion, many of the fiber works resemble corrosion of rust and wood decay rather than any form of representation. A metaphor for the cycle of life in nature and the sensitivity of nature to human impact.
About Landscape (pictured above) represents one of Xiaoyi's most erosional pieces. The assembled fiber installation has smears of brown dye in a manner which resembles rust or the decay of bark on the soil. These natural processes represented in her works build a deeper connection to her environments rather than simply depicting the landscape. Vibrant and expressive, the fiber piece exemplifies and symbolizes nature through process.
Xiaoyi Lin creates exciting, expressive works which reflect the connotations and metaphors of nature through texture and surface. Her works are not merely dye paintings but rather assembled fiber pieces manipulated to represent the essence of nature through documentation of water and pH sustenance. She modifies these flat planes to reflect the complex nature of human impact upon the environment and the need for reclamation and ecological efforts to reverse the trends which change the environment towards negative consequences. Xiaoyi Lin remains a deeply metaphorical artist who treats nature like an apparition to be captured through essence rather than literal connotations.
