In the work of London-based metal and jewellery artist Yuanxing (Layla) Lin, metal becomes unexpectedly tender. What appears at first glance to be rigid, weighty, and industrial is reimagined as something woven, ghostlike, and textural—an echo of cloth translated into the permanence of metal. Born in 1997 in Xiamen, China, Lin has built a practice that sits at the crossroads of feminist inquiry, material transformation, and the intimate languages of craft. Her pieces, often formed from meticulously woven fine wires, do more than challenge metal’s inherent hardness. They question the systems—historical, cultural, and gendered—that determine how materials are valued and how bodies are seen.
Lin’s artistic vocabulary emerges from a richly layered education. After completing her BA in Jewellery Design at Central Saint Martins, she deepened her critical foundations through an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. This dual grounding—technical mastery and theoretical rigor—now anchors her work at the Royal College of Art, where she has developed an innovative method of creating textile-like metal sheets from woven wire. Her extensive training spans not only schools but also studios: she has worked with practitioners such as Castro Smith, Sian Evans, and engravers in Japan and the Philippines, experiences that collectively refined her sensitivity to craft traditions and their embedded cultural meanings.
Surfacing The Crack #3, 2024, Silver
Her current body of work, “Surfacing The Crack,” crystallizes many of these concerns. The project began with a question: how can jewellery and metal reflect the phenomenological and historical experiences of women? Lin approaches this not through narrative illustration, but through material analogy. She turns to weaving—a technique long entwined with women’s labour—to explore how fragments can be unified, how softness can be engineered within hard matter, and how the repetitive gestures of craft can both nurture and constrain.
Working with wire as thin as 0.1 mm, she creates woven surfaces that ripple between fragility and firmness. These sheets, once soldered or patinated, take on the quiet luminosity of moonlit metal—a visual language echoed in her interest in silver as a culturally symbolic material. In Chinese vernacular stories, silver appears as a metaphor for women’s constrained value within patriarchal structures; Lin’s pieces speak to these tensions. Her Identity Necklace (2023), for instance, hides a strand of pure gold within woven silver, a subtle critique of the ways women’s worth is misread, underestimated, or commodified.
Surfacing The Crack#5, 2025, Silver
The crack, in Lin’s work, is not merely a flaw. It is an aperture—into memory, into invisibility, into the space between the visible object and its unspoken history. She describes cracks as “the gap between the visible and invisible,” a place where forgotten souls and ghostly presences reside. By revealing the “skeleton” of precious objects, she destabilizes conventional hierarchies of value. In her hands, metal’s sheen becomes a misleading façade, prompting viewers to consider what structures—social, material, gendered—lie beneath.
Lin’s research extends beyond technique, drawing on feminist theory, Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics, phenomenology, and material culture studies. These frameworks infuse her work with a conceptual resonance that aligns her with artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Caroline Broadhead, whose practices similarly probe the body, memory, domesticity, and the blurred thresholds between presence and absence. For Lin, jewellery is not an accessory but a vessel for intimate thinking—a form capable of carrying emotion, critique, and lived histories.
Her woven metal forms also speak to the broader question of what contemporary jewellery can be. Lin is uninterested in jewellery as symbolic identity marker; instead, she imagines it as a medium that shapes affective space. When detached from the body, photographed, or installed, her pieces become sculptural propositions. When imagined on the body, they evoke a “textiled” sense of identity—flexible, layered, and in flux.
Surfacing The Crack #4, 2025, Silver
Lin’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Season Gallery, Galerie Variation in Paris, and Blackdot Gallery in London, renowned for showcasing innovative material practices. Her 2025 exhibitions—including Losing Ghosts in London and Femmes Indéfinissables in Paris—further situate her in a growing global conversation on feminist craft and material experimentation.
Ultimately, Yuanxing (Layla) Lin’s practice expands the possibilities of metal by returning to the quiet power of woven structures. Through every interlaced wire, she opens a space where the boundaries between softness and strength, visibility and erasure, tradition and subversion begin to dissolve. In doing so, she offers a poignant re-reading of both metalwork and femininity: not as fixed forms, but as evolving, intricate tapestries shaped by hand, history, and imagination.
