Lisbon (Portugal), 2024

There is a sacred instant when the wave touches the shore—not before, not after—that fleeting blink in which the sea offers itself to the land. Where the Waves Break captures that threshold. Not as a photograph, but as an offering suspended in time. This installation, composed of hand-blown glass waves tinted with natural dyes and resting upon sea sand, is a poetic attempt to hold what cannot be held. A gesture of freezing motion at the very moment it becomes stillness.

The waves, frozen mid-dance, seem to either emerge or retreat, caught in that eternal ebb and flow. Their transparency is not fragility, but truth: the glass reveals what water only suggests. They trace impossible curves, as if sculpted by passing winds. The sand, both witness and accomplice, receives their forms, holds them, welcomes them.

Where the Waves Break is a meditation on arrival, pause, and longing. On that edge where the liquid wishes to become solid, where time tries to stretch itself to avoid dissolving. It is also a memory of what leaves and what returns. The wave is not only water: it is body, impulse, ancestral voice. It is an echo that always comes back, always different, yet with the same thirst to touch.

This piece invites us to inhabit the threshold, to look closely at what usually slips by too fast. To understand that there is beauty in what doesn’t last, and power in those who dare to hold it—even if just for a moment.

Charleen Capote