A Soft Place to Land: Lexy Ho-Tai on Building a Kinder World

What inspired you to develop A Soft Place to Land, and what led you to focus on creating textiles and soft sculptures?

Lexy Ho-Tai: I started by asking what I wanted to see in the world right now. Thinking about how hard the world feels right now, I thought about these larger-than-life beings, to make people feel small and held. I really wanted a place for people to rest. Although, when I go back through my old work, I feel like I’ve been exploring this idea for more than a decade.

I work in a lot of mediums and consider myself a multidisciplinary artist, but textiles are my first love. It’s the medium I always return to. People interact with textiles every day through clothes and domestic objects. So in a museum context, it makes the pieces really inviting and less intimidating. I also love their resiliency. How is it that their softness actually makes them so long-lasting? I’ve moved around a ton and I really love how I can just fold up a textile piece, stuff it in a bag, and the fact that it does break or tear, and is also really easy to mend and repair, becomes part of the story.

How did you come to use the upcycled materials? Does sustainability play a major role in your practice?

Coming from an immigrant family, it’s almost generational knowledge. When I was growing up, I recall seeing my grandma use orange bags as a sponge and just using what was at hand. That’s something I continue to do in my art practice. I also think the way that we’re living is deeply unsustainable, and I’m disgusted by capitalism, consumerism, and want to participate in those systems as little as possible. Of course, I can’t change these systems on a really large scale, but I can use my life and art practice as a model for the world I want to be in. And that includes rethinking materials which we do have in such abundance. I think a lot of creativity comes out of using what you have around you.

How do you hope folks at the family festival will engage with the work and all the interactive components a part of it?

I hope it’s a space in which people can feel a sense of comfort. There’re also two classrooms that are offshoots of the installation where folks are invited to create art. We have areas for making costumes and upcycled flowers. Folks are invited to create artworks and then add them to the installation. So I hope the installation will evolve as people enter the space and use their creativity. Most importantly, I hope it will provide a pause from this world, during which they can sit still with themselves. By authentically expressing myself, I hope I can invite kids to do the same. I think that’s important. We live in a world where there are a lot of social constructs and voices telling us what to do and how to be. I really want kids to remember that they’re great in their fullness and their weirdness.