'how to stop the stream from running?' 2025

Wall object | glass, fabric, wax, resin, writing on tracing paper
68 x 80 x 10cm
The work centres on a broken sheet of glass, its fragments held together by a translucent fabric that seems to suspend them mid-current. The surfaces appear wet, as though they are truly resting in a river’s flow. In front of them, a sheet of cathedral glass casts a shifting, watery shadow across a piece of tracing paper. Written on it are the words: ‘how to stop the stream from running?’

Placed loosely within the structure is a wax hand, reaching towards something. Caught between holding and letting go, the installation lingers in the tension between interruption and inevitability - between the desire to halt a current and the knowledge that streams, whether of water, time, or feeling, continue to run.
'how to stop the stream from running?' (2025) by Helen Kohl
'how to stop the stream from running?' (2025) by Helen Kohl