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There’s something fitting about Caylin “Lin” Elkins commandeering two carts in the back hallway of NextFab. It’s resourceful, a little scrappy, and deeply intentional, which are all qualities that define her practice as an artist, designer, and maker.
Lin is currently coming to the end of a two-month winter residency at NextFab, hosted in partnership with the Museum for Art in Wood, and running from January through the beginning of March. The residency provides her with 24/7 access to the shop, full use of the equipment, and staff support to bring her proposal to life. The culmination? A gallery exhibition right here at NextFabon on March 12th, followed by an artist talk on March 13th.
Lin originally applied to the Windgate Arts Residency through the Museum of Art in Wood in partnership with NextFab and was not accepted. She didn’t get that one, but the team encouraged her to stay in touch. She moved forward with her plans to relocate to Philly, intending to dive into its thriving art scene.
Lin moved to this city deliberately. She believed it was a place with a deep, genuine respect for the arts, and the reality has matched the expectation. From the murals covering entire building facades to the mosaic-covered walls tucked around residential corners, Philadelphia wears its creativity publicly.
“Sustainability is a really big part of my practice,” she explains, “and I wanted to get more connected and ingrained with the artist and creative community in Philly.” The city, she says, checked every box.
Lin was trained as a furniture maker, but her work has been moving steadily toward sculpture. Her pieces aren’t intended for viewership only, but invite you in, ask you to move things around, and make you feel something.
At the heart of the residency proposal is a tension she lives with every day: the dichotomy between the natural and the built environment, and the illusion of control we try to maintain over both. One piece grapples with humanity’s impulse to harness nature’s power, despite it being incredibly unruly. Another is a commentary on the space race and our tendency to escape or abandon things instead of fixing what’s in front of us.
To incorporate her respect for history, a third piece draws on a game most of us know as Chutes and Ladders, but its origins run much deeper. The original game, Snakes and Ladders, is centuries old, possibly dating back to nomadic civilizations who carried it on tapestries and cloths. It was designed to teach morality and consequences: climb a ladder for a virtuous act, slide down a snake for a moral failing. Lin has reimagined the game through the lens of contemporary ambition, weaving in architectural elements drawn from the streets of Philadelphia. The constant climbing, whether it’s toward the perfect job, the perfect life, or the highest rung on the corporate ladder, gets a gentle but honest interrogation.
“There is no perfect anything,” she says, “and the constant climbing may not give you all you’d hoped.”
It’s a theme she admits she wrestles with personally, navigating the tension between artistic vision and the practical realities of surviving in the world. Her hope for everyone who walks through the exhibition? “A little bit of curiosity and wonder.” She wants people to be jolted out of the monotony of routine and to remember that creativity, curiosity, and a willingness to see things differently are what actually move us forward.
Lin’s path here has been anything but linear. After studying furniture design at Appalachian State University, in a program that insisted students know how to build everything they designed, she completed a fellowship at UNC Asheville, spent time at North House Folk School diving into traditional craft (yes, including learning to shear a sheep), and then spent two years at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Maine.
That breadth of training isn’t just biographical trivia. It’s the foundation of everything she makes. Understanding the heritage behind weaving, timber framing, natural dyes, and woodworking gives her, she says, a strong enough foundation to execute pretty much any idea that comes through her head. For this residency, she’s been pushing beyond woodworking into digital fabrication, mechanical movement, and metalwork; skills she’s wanted to return to and incorporate into her latest work.
There’s also a deep commitment to sustainable material sourcing, which is supported by the requirement that 50% of materials used during the residency need to be reclaimed. Lin works with offcuts from local cabinet makers, pulls usable pieces from the scrap bins at NextFab, and tries to ensure that what she makes either reduces harm or supports regenerative practices. “Digging into the trash is kind of my MO,” she laughs.
For Lin, the residency has been as much about immersion in a creative ecosystem as it is about the work itself. “I really have loved being back in a space where there are people from all different walks of life, all different backgrounds, working on so many different projects,” she says.
After spending a few months in a smaller private studio when she first arrived in Philly, the energy from moving to NextFab’s communal shop has fed directly into her practice. Access to the full range of machines, the support of knowledgeable staff, and the informal exchange of ideas with fellow makers have given her the runway to experiment in ways that simply wouldn’t have been possible alone.
She thrives on the feedback, the chance encounters, the ability to walk a piece over to a stranger and ask, how does this make you feel? It’s not just a preference; it’s integral to her process. Her work is made to be interacted with, and making it in isolation would undermine everything it’s trying to do.
So what’s next? Join us for the free gallery opening and artist talk on March 13th from 6:30-7:30 at NextFab. Come ready to engage. Lin wouldn’t have it any other way.
RSVP here.
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Written in Partnership with FORMATION. Media