Sunny Jackson is an interdisciplinary contemporary artist and designer from the United States whose practice spans sculpture and narrative portraiture, centered on inquiries of material intelligence, perception, and human presence. She spent her early life divided between her family’s bison farm in Iowa and summers in Yellowstone National Park’s remote backcountry, landscapes that shaped her sensitivity to the immaculate design of nature and the quiet power of the invisible energy that runs through these environments. She later earned a degree in Landscape Architecture from Arizona State University, uniting her love of design with her lifelong relationship to the natural world.

Working with crystal, wood and light, Jackson constructs objects and environments that treat light as a relational medium, one that implicates the viewer in an exchange between material and consciousness. Her work investigates material intelligence as a vector of presence: how wood, crystal, voids and light record time, hold attention, and shape encounters. Materials are approached not as inert components, but as active participants, each carrying its own logic, memory, and instruction.

Her studio sculptures are one-of-a-kind forms. Wood carries the trace of growth and duration; crystal provides resonance and captures light; engaging the viewer in the work as a form of inner observation with the material intelligence of the work. In Jackson’s practice, light becomes phenomenal, a medium through which presence is measured, and through which viewers may find stillness, reflection, and inner illumination.

Jackson’s discovery of quartz crystals later in life opened a new dimension in her work, inspiring her signature light sculptures and a deeper exploration of energy, resonance, and our connection with our inner selves as a reflection of our collective self. These inquiries now extend beyond the studio through Sourcelight – an art system where every person shines with their own “sourcelight,” acknowledging human expression as both an individual and collective brilliance. Sourcelight manifests as a decentralized social sculpture that utilizes the mathematical symmetry of the E8 lattice to map 6,720 individual instances of human expression, each represented by a physical Lumen crafted from chrome, raw quartz crystal and light. By linking these physical artifacts to a digital geometry anchored by 240 cultural luminaries, Sourcelight forms a living network of collective witness and presence.

Across both her studio practice and Sourcelight, Sunny Jackson consistently asks: what shifts when materials, and light itself, are treated not as decoration or utility, but as witnesses to presence – conduits of phenomenological experience, and carriers of luminous attention?