Signal Field
2026
Permanent installation at Heartland Whole Health Institute, on the campus of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Several years ago, post-Covid, I took an interest in learning how to regulate my nervous system in response to the disruptions of that time and started trying to understand how biochemical and electrical signals shape our cognition, senses, and perception, and how experience shapes a nervous system and vice versa.
Signal Field has been my most ambitious attempt yet at bringing such an idea into form and was an opportunity to manifest this idea at scale. The piece holds 135 illuminated, hand-blown glass bulbs, that are embellished with quartz crystal on delicate copper stems. These forms represent synaptic nodes spread across two architectural volumes. The lighting logic is derived from models of neural firing, so the piece never settles into a steady or orchestrated pattern. Instead, it clusters and pulses unevenly, dense in some places and quiet in others, reflecting the way a real network fires, never resolving into perfect symmetry. Nearly ten thousand feet of hand crocheted copper wire references the electrochemical network that drives neural activity.
This work is about the experience of a system in constant signal, with the intent of activating regions of the brain that govern pleasure and reward.