Helen Lee

My artistic practice is built out of a material lust for glass and an insatiable curiosity around language. I investigate language and the body by experimenting with glass and typography. My work posits language as a somatic experience. The confluence of objects and semiotic units in my work collapses the physical with the linguistic. In mechanical terms, I have an extensive repertoire of vitreous typography. I blow glass in capital Roman and lowercase script letters. I type on a computer with a font made of glass. I write with light; I write in shadow.
At the core of my practice is a curiosity about the morphological nature of language. My early work does this by traversing a circuit of relationships through glass, design, and the body. In the space of boundary, duality, and transformation, I dwell on the moments in which: breath becomes sound; sound becomes spoken; the spoken word turns written; and the written word is shaped back into dimensional form by my own breath.
My cultural background has always been integral to my practice with respect to shaping my relationship to language. In early 2015, this relationship shifted as my daughter moved into this world. I have been revisiting the dual experiences that have shaped my life—between the dead and living, Chinese and American, Mandarin and English, sound and silence. The inscription of my cultural identity has become a focal point of my recent work, where I have been playing with literal mistranslations, slippery interpretations, crossed wires of communication, and other unintentional consequences of bilingualism.
I see my studio practice as not unlike my subject matter in the sense of its evolution. The linguist John McWhorter offers this wisdom on language, which I liken to my practice: “Words never keep their meanings over time. A word is a thing on the move. A word is a process.”