["New York Close Up"]
I grew up surrounded by the ocean.
It's a place to let your thoughts wash over you,
almost like daydream or sleep,
where anything is possible.
["Caroline Woolard's Floating Possibility"]
I think what it means to be an artist
is to be voraciously curious about the world around you.
And I cling to every fact and image that compels me.
During my research process I became obsessed with this historic vessel.
The amphora is a two-handled vessel with a pointy bottom
that looks like a turnip or a carrot,
and it was used by conquered people
to ship goods like olive oil or wine to ancient Rome.
I also found that the "at" symbol that we use in email every single day
is a mark for an amphora.
And I would never have thought that every time I press the "at" symbol
I'm conjuring an imperial form.
A transformation from the amphora to the "at" symbol
relates to a lot of my interest in economy and exchange.
For me it felt like a clear direction to go in.
[WOOLARD] --Hello.
[HELEN LEE] --Hey!
[WOOLARD] --Okay so what have you been working on?
[LEE] --I have some murrines.
[WOOLARD] I knew that
it would be impossible for me to pursue this project alone.
[LEE] --I'll show you the "at."
[WOOLARD] --Oh it's so hard to see!
[LAUGHING]
[LEE] --There you go.
[WOOLARD] The "at" symbol is so much about digital communication,
which often occurs through a glass interface,
so I wanted to work with master glassblowers.
[UrbanGlass, Brooklyn]
I fell in love with glass because it's automatically collaborative.
[Alexander Rosenberg, artist]
The way glassblowers are trained,
you have to work in a group of two or three or four,
and at best, glassblowers flow together in a
non-verbal choreography
to produce things that would be impossible if they were working alone.
[Helen Lee, artist]
So we went into the material exploration itself,
which was always informed by the research,
but also leave space for the material to speak on its own.
We tried making many different amphorae.
We made a custom blow mold of the ancient form.
We tried making hourglasses
to think about the word "amphorae" which means "carried on both sides."
The amphorae were not made for display.
They were made to be taken off of ships
and to find their ground in the sand.
In order to imagine the amphorae at sea,
as they're often found,
we decided to go to the beach.
[Rockaway, Queens]
--Babies, a lot of babies.
At the beach, we had to learn
how these objects, with their pointy bases,
would find stability.
We tried filling them with sand.
We tried filling them with water.
We tried looking at them floating in the water.
And what we found was that
they have an incredible capacity to almost levitate.
I love objects that have an uneasy relationship to gravity
and this inability to reconcile a concrete and hardened world.
We know that, for this project, we'll be at a traditional gallery space.
Another will be in a performance lecture.
Another will be online as a project site.
We're in the state of the project where we continue to experiment--
where we continue to say "yes" to one another's whims.
I want to move into a space of speculative fiction
to allow myself to imagine, as a visual artist,
what could be.
What if the amphora could unroll and becomes a wave or a line?
What if the imperative to communicate that we have right now,
is, in the future, an imperative to rest?
What would it mean to suspend disbelief
and make a work of art that's for a dream state?
What if art could be a kind of glistening glass object
in the middle of the ocean?