Lucy McKnight

Medium: Sound installation

Bio

Lucy McKnight is an artist who works with colors, textures, and sounds to create environments where she and others can explore intense emotions and ways of surviving them. Current and recent mediums include paint, ceramics, tinfoil, magnets, wire, fabric, her cello, her own body and voice, and her friends’ bodies and voices. She is interested in touch, connection, movement, and using sound to build mutually cathartic experiences. She loves to swim in natural bodies of water, with particular affinity for the Pacific Ocean off the coast of her hometown, Los Angeles. Currently, she and her three deeply affectionate cats live in her wildly colorful home in Trenton, New Jersey while she pursues a PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University.

"In my currently untitled interactive sound sculpture, I invite viewers to surround themselves with visual and sonic expressions of two extreme experiences of my mind: cloud bursts of elation and joy, and dark twisting tangles of anxiety. The sculpture is a loose column of floating orbs, with multi-colored fluffy spheres on one side, and black tangled wire on the other. Viewers are welcome to walk around the sculpture and enter it one by one. Each colorful floof and black tangle is a speaker, with a magnet wrapped in copper wire at its center which will vibrate with sound designed to represent these two experiences. I created this sculpture to externalize and share these intense brain processes, so that I and others may hear and feel them as they vibrate and sing, fighting to drown each other out."