Joyce Lin
Coat Tree
2026
Red oak, epoxy clay, epoxy resin, fabric, acrylic paint, steel armature
24 x 21 x 86 inches
About Joyce Lin:
Joyce Lin’s sculptures are often structured around interconnected tensions—part and whole, interior and exterior, organic and artificial—yet these oppositions are deliberately never resolved. Instead, they remain suspended in a state of productive instability, a process Lin describes as a form of “material autopsy.” Her work occupies this unsettled territory of in-between states, where objects and materials appear displaced from their expected contexts.
Appearing at first as a fledgling red oak tree in autumn, with richly colored foliage extending from its branches, Coat Tree gradually transitions downward into the familiar form of a contemporary coat stand. Neither entirely tree nor entirely object, the work exists somewhere between the organic world and the functional language of contemporary mass-manufactured furniture design. As discussed in relation to Atkinson’s example where the body works on a body, this sculpture is also deeply self-referential: it is made from red oak, simultaneously being made to resemble red oak. The work captures the tree at a moment of seasonal transformation, suspended between the fullness of autumn and the dormancy of winter, existing between states of growth and decline.
