Featured Artist: Seden Lai

A collection of Seden Lai's recent work will be on view in a Retail Window Feature at the Craft Ontario Shop from April 25 - May 31, 2026. Shop the Online Collection! 

Cycles, as an intuitive emergence within natural ecosystems, has been a guiding presence in Seden Lai's paper practice. Flora, from bloom to decay and in their dialogue with the world, is a wonderful example of cyclical returns. Her works grasp toward this same approach to visual rhythm via craft processes using iteration and repetitive gestures like folding, pleating, and hammering. 

Seden describes her craft practice as, "Integrating common materials like paper, metal, and fabric, I respond instinctively to fragments embedded in our every day. Embracing the messages that may be hidden within the mundane, I try to decipher these entanglements through material exploration and worldbuilding. Our relationship to time and memory as fluid, slippery, and subjective are recurring questions in my practice. In contrast to conventional measures like hours and minutes, my work imagines other containers for timekeeping through ephemeral subjects like flowers, light, and shadow. 

"My practice centres on paper, understanding its strength and properties as both a surface material for image-making and its malleability for sculptural works. Since childhood, I recall folding paper swans, origami stars, and little jumping frogs. During the pandemic lockdown, I returned to this material in its most accessible form – through scrap papers, posters, and cardboard, and rediscovered the satisfaction of taking something flat and transforming it into an unexpected, three-dimensional form. 

"The work I've prepared for this Craft Ontario feature extends these explorations into speculative world-building: a collection of 10 sculptures suspended in an imagined underwater world. Mysterious aquatic creatures, botanical life in transformation, forms that resemble sea anemone and coral branches come together to form an ecosystem with its own mythology. Illuminated sculptures rendered in layers of translucent papers and cutouts let light pass through, inhabiting a palette of pale yellows, coral reds, and sea-foam greens, with flashes of bioluminescent blue and amber. Intimate and delicate, they share a communal space in conversation with each other and the viewer, evoking something pre-verbal and bodily: the emotional memory of water." 

Continue reading below for the interview between Craft Ontario and Seden Lai on her 2026 Retail Window Feature!

Craft Ontario: How did your journey with paper begin?

Seden Lai: I was always folding paper and different origami patterns as a child. I loved making paper swans, stars, and little jumping frogs. During COVID lockdown, paper was one of the most accessible materials I had on hand. I took an online course in paper engineering and it opened up those material memories for me. I would take scrap papers from the mail, snippets from posters, cardboard and just explore - I love the idea of taking something completely flat and through folding, pleating, and curling, transform it into an unexpected three-dimensional form. The natural motifs came from searching for beauty and learning from the complex structures of nature.

When looking back on how your practice has evolved over time, has there been an exploration of other motifs within the same style or was there a totally unrelated departure?

Material feedback is a huge part of my learning, and my practice is constantly evolving in response to what I'm making. I almost never begin with a fully formed vision. I trust my intuition and follow what feels like an interesting story in the making or what's coming through. In the past year, I've slowly incorporated more sheet metal into my work, translating what I've learned from paper to metal. I really enjoy speculative fiction, and certain motifs like flowers hold so many potential stories. From a worldbuilding perspective this has given me a lot of creative room to expand from flowers to the wider landscapes they exist in.

How does your Degree in Industrial Design influence the work you produce?

Industrial Design gave me a deep understanding of design rigour and attention to detail. To look at the objects and environment that permeates modern life and appreciate that there are reasons it behaves this way. Going back to the idea of worldbuilding and speculative fiction, what do the objects I find and keep signal about my world? If I extend that question logic into an imagined future, there are so many potential interpretations that come from a single artifact.

Your work brings to form the cycles of the natural world as time passes and time itself as a force, which calls to mind endless building petals, folds, and branches in a sequence of Fibonacci. Are there any similar forces you use in mind to bring balance and a completeness to your pieces?

I think about rituals and repetition a lot and how life is governed by sunrise and sunset as recurring bookends to the day. We repeat so many things on the daily, which can feel exhausting but I'm also interested in what happens when you make the same gesture over and over - slowly it becomes meaningful or you've developed a special and personal ritual. I apply this thinking to my practice with paper pleating and repeated motifs, a single fold itself isn't remarkable, but the accumulation of all these little things transforms it altogether. 

How would you describe your current relationship to time in regards to the past and future, as explored through your craft?

I'm answering this with all the Artemis II updates happening in the background, and one of the astronauts said "In all this emptiness, you have this oasis" it's such a beautiful and amazing perspective. There's a lot of time and infinity out there. Natural cycles, like the bloom and decay of flowers, carry impermanence with a lot of grace. Beginnings and endings give us anchor points and context, it provides a way of knowing where we belong in an otherwise vast and infinite universe.

With so much despair and hopelessness and fear attached to current affairs on the world's water supply, what is the emotional approach and message your pieces work through, in relation to water? Is it the same, is it different, and how so?

I grew up in Ontario, swimming in lakes and surrounded by water. As a child what I liked most was the feeling we were all submerged in the same body of water - we could all be in our own worlds but at the same time it's a communal activity, there are no borders in something shifting and in constant motion. The idea of dividing it up feels genuinely wrong and unfair to me. But I don't want the work to be a document of despair, I want it to hold the emotional memory of water. Instead of thinking of it as a commodity, I hope this work can be a storytelling device for the rich relationships and dynamic life that is nurtured by water. 

A collection of Seden Lai's recent work will be on view in a Retail Window Feature at the Craft Ontario Shop from April 25 - May 31, 2026. Shop the Online Collection!