As ‘Soft Services’ continues its installation at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery, artist Chloë Bass reflects on public space as a site of intimacy, collective responsibility, and quiet resistance -where a simple bench becomes an invitation to slow down, connect, and imagine new forms of care.
6 August 2026
For Chloë Bass, art begins where everyday life unfolds. In this conversation, the New York – based artist discusses ‘Soft Services’-her public artwork of sculptural benches installed throughout Seattle’s Volunteer Park – and the questions it asks about care, memory, democracy, and belonging. From the legacies of the AIDS and COVID pandemics to the politics of attention in an age of distraction, Bass explores how public art can create spaces for reflection without prescribing answers, inviting us to see shared landscapes – and one another – with renewed curiosity.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: What drew you to the public bench as the central vehicle for exploring such expansive social and political questions?
Chloë Bass: I think that expansive questions are, or should be, at the core of everyday political and personal life. If we’re lucky, we encounter other people in our lives with whom we can discuss complex topics or feelings. However, in the context of civic life, sometimes these questions are formally acknowledged, but most often they aren’t – they’re implied, or felt, but not stated. One of the ways in which complex questions are informally acknowledged is through the design, maintenance, and use of public space, including who has access and who does not, and in what ways, and when. It feels important to me to bring language, as well as aesthetically compelling or beautiful objects, to a site where I feel these questions are alive and at play both in the contemporary everyday, as well as historically and in an imagined future.
Maybe another, simpler way to say this is that I want to put my work where people already are, and to introduce that work, which bears complex ideas, in forms that people can relate to, or use.
How does reclaiming this history reshape contemporary conversations about care, particularly as societies still debate what counts as necessary?
I’m not sure what history I’m reclaiming with ‘Soft Services’. I do think there’s history that I’m acknowledging. The difference for me between acknowledgement and reclamation is that reclamation implies a kind of repair, whereas acknowledgement offers a chance for representation without necessarily making a claim that representation alone is sufficient for repair.
The history that I’m acknowledging is two-fold, perhaps three-fold. The two clear folds are the history of interpersonal care during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s; and then the history of interpersonal care during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Both AIDS and COVID are still producing devastating health effects on people all over the world, and these effects will continue to grow in harm due to the cuts in assistance produced through the dismantlement of USAID, as well as the shifts in research and funding outcomes for vaccination and other scientifically minded programs domestically due to government priorities for the U.S. Department of Health. It feels urgent to acknowledge past histories of medical care, both at governmental levels and direct personal levels, to remind us of what we have not done, but also what we have done and can do. “Soft services,” as a medical term, are aspects of support deemed assistive to patients, but not strictly necessary, and as such not covered by traditional healthcare – things like massages, meal trains, etc. During the early 90s, Seattle residents had the temporary opportunity to use funding provided by the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act to cover these soft services. This was a form of support, and an acknowledgement of different levels or forms of care, produced by the government! We must remember what is possible, while also recognising what we do not currently receive at a systemic level.
How has working across an entire public park expanded your thinking about the relationship between personal experience and collective responsibility?
I have a skewed relationship to the connection between personal experience and collective responsibility because I was born and raised in New York City, a place where I accepted the daily condition of having over eight million neighbours. Each of my neighbours is always having a personal experience, but a lot of those experiences bump up against each other (often literally) in moments of intimacy across widely varying moments of time. New York is chaotic, dirty, and loud, but the truth is also that if people are not accepting collective responsibility at a basic level almost all of the time, in almost all spaces, it would be a lot worse. I’m not even sure we think actively about collective responsibility – there’s a more tacit or passive understanding that it takes all of us to hold the peace together.
Public spaces are where we most often encounter people who are not necessarily like us, and I think that’s a good thing. However, the discomfort of being around the unfamiliar can also produce moments of friction or conflict. Most of these moments are temporary and harmless – irritating at best – but some can have fatal consequences. Working across a public park as an artist is just a way of affirming what I know as a person: that there is, and must be, room for complexity of feeling, a variety of experiences, and moments of beauty as part of the commons. These things don’t need to be sequestered or rarified in order to be safe, or to have meaning. People do this anyway. My work is just one way of giving it form and voice.
How do you write language that remains open enough for viewers to bring their own memories, histories, and emotional experiences into the work?
This is the part of art that I think I need to chalk up to “intuition” or “magic.” There are definitely things I’m careful not to do: I try not to generalise everything to the lowest common denominator of language (think “live, laugh, love” – none of that for me, thanks!). I try not to assume who my audience is, how they feel, or what they think or believe. I make sure that my work isn’t telling people what to do. Beyond that, I don’t have a specific strategy. I will say that it takes a lot of time, a lot of listening to what’s going on around me in the world, and a lot of honesty and editing.
How do you navigate these intersecting histories while resisting the impulse to offer one interpretation?
I don’t think I have a single interpretation to offer, in the same way that no one in the park is having the exact same day, even if they’re coexisting in the same place at the same time. I’m also interested in conversation, and most conversations that focus around a single interpretation can get boring quickly and don’t tend to lead towards growth. I am not angled towards conflict, but I am angled towards complexity, except in situations that use complexity as a foil for basic compassionate behaviour.
What conversations did you hope would emerge between the botanical imagery, the inscriptions, and the surrounding landscape?
The botanical imagery is actually drawn from the surrounding landscape. Each of the benches is engraved with the silhouette of one of the following plants: the alder, which is native to the park’s landscape and still exists within the park; the black locust, which was introduced to the park as an element of landscape design; and the western juniper, which does not yet exist in the park, but may in the future – it’s a species predicted as highly likely to arrive in the Seattle area as a result of climate change. It’s possible that all three species will co-exist at some point. So you can think of the conversation between the imagery and the landscape as a deep investigation of time.
The inscriptions are both an invitation to come closer to the benches – I like to live in a world where if people can see that there are words on an object, they want to read them – and also an invitation either to rest your mind on the meaning of the language, or to take the language back to the surrounding landscape. You can take it back actively, by talking about the meaning of the words, or the feelings that the words evoke, with another person who happens to be there. You can take it back passively, by using the time in the park to sit and meditate on the inscription’s meaning, or your resulting feelings. And then there’s the element of chance: when you’re in the park, engaging with these benches, other things are most likely going on around you. What happens when you see that passing moment of someone else’s life, or many people’s lives, and apply the inscription’s language to that temporary, shared experience? There’s an alchemy in the intersection between what is fixed in place and what’s always changing around it.
In a culture increasingly defined by speed and distraction, do you see sustained attention as a political or ethical act?
I think we owe it to ourselves not to be distracted all the time. We owe it to our nervous systems, and we also owe it to our spirits. Sustained attention has a way of making me calm. When I’m calm, I’m able to act more ethically towards myself, as well as towards others. Exhaustion – which distraction can easily contribute to – makes us less compassionate, less nuanced, and generally less interesting. Some people might promote rest. I am promoting engagement. Democracy is a system that requires participation, and participation without engagement is a weak form. We grow stronger through our attention, and the expanded thoughts and actions that sustained attention assists us to produce.
How do you imagine the project’s meaning evolving as both the landscape and the communities who inhabit it continue to change?
‘Soft Services’ was installed in Volunteer Park in 2022, so there have already been some changes since the work’s development and premiere. We are no longer as close to the specific feelings of COVID lockdown, or the tentative “return” to each other that we experienced at that time, for example. I don’t live in Seattle. I have only been able to visit the work once since it was installed, and it was on a very rainy, cold day, so not many people were in the park. It’s hard for me to say how the communities around, or within, Volunteer Park have changed in the last four years, or how they might change in the future, but it is my hope that the statements on the benches retain an open-ended meaning that allows people to continue to connect with their own interior selves, and with the people and places around them.
Materially, the work has changed a bit since it was installed. The stones’ shapes have slightly softened. Some of the paint within the inscriptions has faded. The reflective glass pigment on the silhouettes is slightly less dense. It’s nice to see the work age while it retains its essential solidity. If we’re lucky, we’ll also get that kind of experience with the people and communities around us. I love the trickster power of being nimble, but there’s a huge, grounding power in the ability to remain.
This installation is on view in Volunteer Park through the Henry Art Gallery until August 2027.
