Hear an excerpt from Jewel’s 'Heart of the Ocean'

Speaking with the 51-year-old artist, it quickly becomes clear she harbors an inner science geek. As an 18-year-old living in her car while trying to break into the music industry, she found solace through a surprising source, physics.

“The way I kept myself from getting depressed was reading books on superstring theory and holographic theory,” said the artist, who has spoken openly about her difficult childhood. “Quantum physics in general is so inspiring. It gives you awe.”

The resin sculpture, whose abstract shape evokes a bodily organ or a chrysalis, takes viewers on a 12-minute sonic journey from the ocean’s surface to its depths, steeping them in a complex system whose activity largely remains invisible to the human eye.

Jewel feels a deep connection to nature, having grown up in a rural 800-acre homestead in Homer, Alaska, along the Kachemak Bay. She describes the body of water as integral to her early years, a devoted companion with its own pulse and moods.

“I had a neglectful childhood, but I knew I was loved, and it was by the land I was raised on,” she said. “Moving away, I was desperately homesick, but it was for the land.”

Jewel now lives in a small Colorado town, and finds calm in the nearby mountains. A longtime proponent of mindfulness and meditation and recent co-founder of virtual mental health platform Innerworld, she hopes “Heart of The Ocean” will help regulate viewers’ nervous systems in the same way nature does for hers.

To that end, the data driving the project needed emotional stakes — “not just scientifically interesting, but connected to something people might care about if they could feel it,” geoscientist Gentemann said. “You can’t see a marine heatwave, far out in an open ocean. But you can hear it building.”

For the visual component of the piece, Jewel matched specific categories of sonified data with colors. Yellow indicates the presence of anglerfish, for example, while hot pink reflects dolphin data, recorded by a scientist tracking the mammals off Miami’s coast to help raise awareness of boat damage to them.

“This really consistent visual and audible audio language helps your brain start tracking what you’re seeing with what you’re hearing, and it starts to be, with time, something you really become familiar with and can discern,” Jewel said.

Matriclysm: An Archaeology of Connections Lost, is being presented in association with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Jewel exhibited her painting and sculpture in 2024.

The exhibit also includes “The Seven Sisters,” a series of glowing glass orbs handblown by Jewel, each of which add a woman’s voice to an a cappella choral arrangement she composed. The forms represent stars in the open star cluster Pleiades, which takes its name from the sister-nymphs of Greek mythology. Many cultures credit the stars with bringing knowledge to ancient civilizations.

Taken together, the pieces in the exhibit gesture toward a larger idea.

“At first glance, this exhibition centers on issues of femininity, power and ecological consciousness, but at its core it is about memory, both profoundly personal and alarmingly global,” Jewel said. “If something of a cautionary tale, my hope is that the show reminds us what it feels like to be in closer harmony, inviting us to unearth ways to reconnect us to ourselves, each other and the world around us.”