There's a very specific category of art that does something particular to my brain — it sets off a ‘ding ding ding’ of recognition and I know I’ve found a kindred spirit.

Lexy Ho-Tai's work does that to me.

Her whole body of work makes me want to simultaneously sprint to my studio and make, make, MAKE, but also give up entirely, because she has already captured something so precisely that I'm not sure there's anything left to say. I mean that as the most reverent compliment I could possibly give.

Brain Chatter is a stop-motion short made from textiles, and it is phenomenal. It’s so weird, and a tiny bit gross, and utterly sublime. The story-telling is amazing - it’s a must watch if you are the owner of a brain.

Stop motion is slooooow. Textiles are fiddly. Combining them is either an act of madness or an act of profound commitment to a vision, and in Lexy's case it feels like a little bit of both.

Go deeper into her work and it only gets better. She has an incredible weird anti-website like this one, and hers is even more mad and creative - I highly recommend you take a look. Her work is staggering too. The sort of thing I wish I had the creativity to make!

Flailing Human (left) and The Heartbreak Monster (right)

The Flailing Human is exactly what it sounds like, and exactly what you need it to be - a physical, handmade, slightly-wonky externalisation of the experience of being a person who is not quite coping. The Heartbreak Monster was made after a nasty break-up - constructed from fabric and papier-mâché for the Mardi Gras Monster Parade. When it was done, she burned it. The making was the processing. The burning was the release. Fucking genius. I’m bowled over by the effortless combination of physical object and performance piece - the theatre of it all!

What she's doing across the whole of her practice - taking the interior experience of being human and making it visible, tangible, a bit monstrous, but also tender and beautiful - is exactly the territory I'm trying to navigate in my own work. We're asking the same questions from different angles, with different materials, in different mediums. And there's something both thrilling and slightly devastating about finding someone who's already been where you're going.

If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, go watch Brain Chatter, then go fall down the rabbit hole of her website, which is completely deranged in the best possible way. She's one of us. You'll know immediately.