HELEN LIENE DREIFELDS

2026

Stainless steel wire, heddles, weaving reed, cotton, silk, wool, wall plaster, ferrous sulfate, gelatine casts, found objects from Pāvilosta, modified recording. Dimensions responsive to Ernesta Šneidera laukums 11.

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8h00 / 22h00 is a site-responsive installation developed during a research residency in Pāvilosta, Latvia.

The title comes from a local resident’s account that inhabitants could access only a limited section of the Kurzeme coast between 8h00 to 22h00. For forty-six years, Pāvilosta lay within a restricted Soviet military border zone. Local histories describe sections of shoreline being ploughed each evening, turning the coast into an instrument of surveillance. The forms of observation have changed, but the coast remains embedded in systems of monitoring intensified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Configured for a former pharmacy, doctor’s office, and weaving studio, fragmented woven structures are suspended across the room. Nearly imperceptible threads connect the fragments to three floor assemblages. Viewers crouch and adjust their bodies around lines that are difficult to see yet redirect their movement through the room.

The installation changes slowly. Plaster cracks across woven surfaces, ferrous sulfate wicks through suspended threads, and gelatine forms slump and leave residue. A distorted recording emanates from behind an open door, withholding its source as the room itself becomes a recording apparatus.

In this work, amber is adopted as a model of material registration. It functions as a pre-photographic medium, recording through adhesion and enclosure rather than optical capture. Texture becomes a materially produced image, where what is preserved remains visible but is inaccessible. I understand this as sticky time, a condition in which an event does not end but remains attached to materials and places as its effects continue to change form.

Through staining, suspension, and delayed transmission, 8h00/22h00 stages contact as something that persists after the conditions that produced it have changed.

Documentation Elīna Treimane-Lieljukse. With thanks to PAiR and VV Foundation.

2025

Installation | Steel, aircraft cable, stainless steel wire, flagging tape, pine construction lumber, clay leech whistles

*Clay whistles in the form of leeches are on the steel blinds, creating a sound as the wind direction changes

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Blind Trust is a site-specific installation that repurposes peripheral infrastructure forms common to low-density contexts, such as utility poles, clotheslines, and Venetian blinds, as devices that organize exposure rather than privacy.

Suspended within the site, the steel and textile slats regulate sight without fully concealing or revealing, while clay whistles modeled after leeches are embedded within the structure. Activated by wind rather than human breath, the installation produces intermittent sound without direct human initiation, displacing agency within environmental and infrastructural systems.

In this context, privacy is treated not as a personal right or interior state but as an operational condition shaped by distance, dependency, and shared infrastructure. The work frames trust as a structural requirement, embedded within systems that function through proximity and dependency, not enclosure.

2025

Installation | Woven cloth, underlay, spraypaint, steel, aluminum flashing. Dimensions to the shed in Skowhegan, Maine.

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How do echoes of past conflicts and ideologies re-emerge in the present? Could subtle, materially sensitive forms of resistance coexist with acts of reparation and sovereignty, supported by multimodal listening and commitment to the effects of historical, political, and social ruptures?

This installation is the second iteration of "Speaking Through Flowers", named after an Eastern European idiom meaning “to speak carefully, with hidden meaning.” This version addresses ongoing consequences of displacement through the physical decline of Latvian diasporic spaces—community centres, summer camps, relief organizations— now partially disappeared. As a descendant, I approach this work with awareness of my positionality, balancing personal connection and the complexities of diasporic memory amid histories of displacement. This project fosters nuanced reflection rather than authoritative reconstruction.

In light of ongoing global conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, which reactivates Baltic history and post-Soviet anxieties, this work asks: What does it mean to sustain a living connection to a history under threat but demanding ongoing reckoning? Rooted in Latvian diasporic memory, the project remains attentive to how these histories intersect with broader, urgent struggles around displacement, colonial legacies, and cultural erasure.

This iteration takes shape in an underused wooden shack in rural Northeastern USA, mirroring the peripheries where many diasporic sites were built. Against broader social and political shifts, this site is a stand in for the symbolic charge of North American landscapes–spaces where complex and often conflicting forces, such as nostalgia and political tensions, converge. Omitting sound and video, the installation uses construction materials to create a liminal environment. Inverting spatial conventions, the shack becomes a container for distortion and dislocation. Paralleling déjà-vu, the work invites an uncanny encounter. What forms of knowledge do these spaces hold? What could be recovered through careful listening?

2025

Installation | Steel, glass, four channel sound, video collage, live voice

15 minutes

teel, glass, four channel sound, video collage, live voice. Variable dimensions. 15 minutes.

"Speaking Through Flowers" is a quadraphonic installation housed in a reimagined playground structure. The title references an Eastern European idiom, roughly translated to speak carefully, implicitly, and with hidden meaning.

Inspired by the subtle subversion of the Baltic Poetic Documentary Movement, the installation layers sonic traces across time. Sound sources include a 1946 refugee camp vinyl recording of Pūt vējiņi, a 1987 avant-garde tape by 19 Gadi Pirms Sākuma anticipating USSR’s collapse, a 2004 pop track on CD marking Latvia’s NATO entry, and contemporary avant-garde music and field recordings. Remixing visual elements from Latvian diaspora community centres and Soviet-era public architecture remnants, the project takes on a modular and iterative form as it will be reconfigured and reimagined, shifting sites while including video projection and live voice activation.

Through layered, multimodal noticing, Speaking Through Flowers explores transmutations of affect, revealing nuanced interpretations of socio-political histories and contemporary collapses through sonic and material traces where past, present, and future moments meet.

*Modular and iterative, this work will be reconfigured and reimagined in various sites alongside live voice activation and video collage projection

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This project’s first iteration was supported by the Yale Centre for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) Studio Fellowship

Documentation: Chen Xiangyun and Maggie Schnyer 

Sound arranged, mixed & mastered by Michael Holland, NTS Radio

Consultations with CCAM team, Yale Slavic Choir, Yale Guild of Carillonneurs, Zile Liepins (video), Baltic Studies Working Group 

2025

Installation | Steel, silk reeling machine, patina, glass marble, lens, handwoven jacquard and floor loom geological map of southwestern Siberia, balsam pine scent, aluminum laime (divination water casting), water residue, theater prop film reel of L. Rezevska’s stone woman sculpture Domātāja, chromatography plates, fragmented PLA bear pelvis, helium dilution refrigerator components for quantum computing, plant matter, hipparchia semele (greyling) rorschach

Documentation: Oresti Tsonopoulos, Pat Garcia, and artist

*Viewers are invited to crouch down onto the floor level to look through the lens which magnifies the glass marble and flips the room upside down

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The title "On the form of the teeth through the wheels" is citational. A subtle play on J.W. Gibbs’ treatise on spur gearing, a technical manual on how motion and force transmit through the teeth of gears. I encountered it during a quantum physics colloquium at the Beinecke Library, prompting questions: How is force transmitted through a body? What are the points of contact between human and mechanical touch? What role does pressure play in transformation?

In spur gearing, energy transfers through friction where two teeth meet. A mechanical interaction becomes metaphor for bodily systems, where energy and experience move through contact, leaving traces. Transmission becomes a language, a record of presence moving through systems of knowledge.

This work explores touch as a porous membrane shaped by time, technology, and relational systems. Ecological models of symbiosis - mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism - offer frameworks to think through interdependence, tension, and proximity.

How might these forms of coexistence heighten sensitivity, invite vulnerability, or generate awareness of individual and collective intensities?

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Deep gratitude to all who supported this work through conversation and presence. This phase was challenging; I feel changed, reflective, and eager to keep growing.

Thank you!

Sculpture cohort, faculty & visiting critics

Studio tasks, install & transitions:
Shellie, Cameron, Amanda, Joy, Taisha, Lizzie, Sok, Haejin, Dai Dai, Nick, Azza

Specialized assistance & resources:
Andy & Colin (Peabody Museum)
Hope & Murat (LMRM)
Daryl & Preston (Yale Scientific Glassblowing Shop)
Colin, Sean, Darcy, Austin, Tamar (MakeHaven)
Leslie (Map)
Martina (Yale Public Health)
Tess (Haas Arts Library)
Dalila, Madison, Jason, Catherine, and Julia (Fab Shop)
Ben, Jaime, and Ryan (Installation)
Anahita (Digital Printing)
Kathleen & co. (Whitney Humanities Textile Working Group)
Vita & co. (Baltic Studies Working Group)
Rare Books on Quantum and Science

Project supported by Class of 2025 Thesis Fund & 2024 Dean’s Travel Fellowship

2024

Installation | Steel, water, mirrors, light, organic matter, dust, hybridization tubes, cast iron knit sample, welding curtain, percussion tools, surgical suture thread, resin, wax, x-ray, vibration, souped C-41 35mm film printed on acetate

Documentation: Pat Garcia and artist

* Viewers are invited to use the drum mallet to strike the hanging chimes and move the water with the pins to create a new projection

2024

Installation | Steel, concrete, burnt wood, aluminum cast flax, envelope, activated carbon, c-print, tinted cyanotype bioplastic, cast heron's skull, granite, acrylic, fossilized pine resin, trīdeksnis, bells, sand

*Viewers are invited to walk on the sand or view the work from the periphery

2023

Sculpture | Steel, cast iron shuttle, sand, brass, handwoven jacquard cotton, stainless steel wire, paper, monofilament nylon, viscose

3’ x 3’4” x 4’

Documentation: Meghan Olsen

2019

Installation in three parts | Gypsum cement, spray paint, ratchet tie down straps, pulleys, bubble wrap, gravel, outdoor patio stones, jack chain, soldered spray painted copper, aluminium panels, theatre gels, jasmine flower, zip ties, off cuts of woven metal siding, hemp, lycra, cotton, silicone, handwoven hemp bandages

Images courtesy of Yuula Benivolski

2022

Sculpture | Aluminum, c-print, brass plate, handwoven jacquard textile, cotton, nylon, industrial sewing thread

4’ x 4’ x 2’

2016

Sculpture | Handwoven monofilament nylon, C-prints

Documentation: Lonsdale Gallery

Two person exhibition Anouk Desloges and Helen Liene Dreifelds

Outside the Lines | November 23 - December 22, 2016

2014 - 2019