ABOUT

BIO
Helen Lee is an artist, designer, and educator. She holds an MFA in Glass from RISD and a BSAD in Architecture from MIT. Her work is in the collections of Minnesota Museum of American Art, Corning Museum of Glass, Chrysler Museum Glass Studio, and Toyama City Institute of Glass Art. Recent exhibitions include: Exuviae at Art Lit Lab, Through a Glass Darkly at Delaware Contemporary, and Momentum | Intersection at Toledo Museum of Art. Lee has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, California College of Art, Pilchuck Glass School, Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Ox-Bow School of Art, China Academy of Art, Toyama City Institute of Glass Art and the MIT Glass Lab. She is currently an Associate Professor and Head of Glass in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and proudly serves as the Director of GEEX, the Glass Education Exchange.

Photo by Kaleb Autman


STUDIO PRACTICE

“Words never keep their meanings over time. A word is a thing on the move. A word is a process.”

—John McWhorter

As an artist, I explore language and diasporic identity through the materiality of glass. I look to this material of flux to help me explore the ways in which language is a moving target—always in motion, changing shape, form, and meaning over time, across cultures, and as mediated through technology. I dwell in these transformational moments.

My relationship to language is shaped by my cultural background as a second-generation Chinese-American. I revisit the dual experiences that have demarcated my life—between the dead and the living, past and present, Chinese and American, Mandarin and English, sound and silence. I work with glass and design processes, mirroring the thinking that has been shaped by bilingualism. My work to-date materializes the relationship between words and things; it makes manifest my ambition to understand loss and absence, and how we ask words to hold meaning in the same way glass holds light. I write in glass, which is to say: I write in light; I write in shadow. In doing so, my work affirms the deepest root of all languages—every word in every language begins with breath.