Xiaoyi Lin

Xiaoyi Lin majored in painting at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in China before studying at Royal College of Art, where she specializes in mixed-media textiles.

Xiaoyi Lin’s practice moves across textiles, drawings, and photographs, all of which gesture towards the rhythm of time or nature as it is intuitively lived and felt. Her 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.

The project revolves around landscape and perception of time during my walks along the River Thames.

The process extrapolates on different frames of research, from personal observations to studies on colour perception, sensory experience, history of time tracking, and technological development of photography.

By experimenting with dyeing and cyanotype using the Thames water, nature itself becomes a material. The water samples were taken in different weather conditions and times of the day. The pH level of the water combines with natural dye and affects colours that collapsed traces of time and light. Each work records the presence of water at different times and weather, using water from the Thames to develop the images, and new landscapes are generated in the process. As both process and representation, they are ambivalent images oscillating between the scene and the seen, calling for new modes of attention.

The River Thames at different times and in different weather.

Colours about weather and time – Changes in sunrise and sunset colours are related to the temperature, air quality and weather.

Cyanotype combined with natural dye, reacting with the water samples of Thames to create a different image.

Xiaoyi Lin

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Royal College of Art