Åva Hudson’s work moves between sculpture, wearable systems, biosensing, and embodied interaction. Using textiles, circuitry, and responsive materials, she builds objects that translate physiological and environmental signals into physical experience. Hudson keeps sensors, wiring, and circuitry visibly embedded within textiles and sculptural forms, allowing the technological system to remain physically present within the work. Drawing from backgrounds in cognitive science and architecture, Hudson approaches wearable technology as sculptural and spatial practice. This takes different forms across works including Pulse, a heartbeat-responsive wearable that transforms cardiac activity into light; Lucent Body, which uses illuminated sculptural forms to blur distinctions between biological and technological systems; and Anti-Surveillance Helmet, a speculative wearable examining visibility, monitoring, and bodily exposure within networked environments.
The Heartbeat as Raw Material
At the center of Pulse is a relatively simple interaction. A heartbeat sensor connected to a custom circuit board causes light embedded within the wearable object to fluctuate in real time according to changes in the wearer’s pulse. The project is built from LEDs, magnetic sensors, recycled circuitry, crystals, textiles, and 3D-printed brain hemispheres.
Circuit boards and electronic components remain exposed rather than concealed beneath polished fabrication. Scrap computer chips sit directly against fabric and sculptural surfaces. Sensors are embedded into the wearable structure itself rather than separated into hidden technical layers. The result feels closer to a constructed artifact than a finished consumer device. Nothing disappears into seamlessness. Light moves unevenly across the object’s surface as the body shifts and the pulse changes.
There are no dashboards, biometric readouts, or quantified visualizations translating the body into data streams. The heartbeat appears instead as changing luminosity moving through material form. That distinction gives the work much of its tension. In Hudson’s practice, biosignals behave less like information than raw material.
Wearables After the Wellness Interface
Most contemporary biosensing technologies are built around optimization. Smart watches measure recovery scores, sleep cycles, heart rate variability, and physical performance, converting bodily activity into measurable outputs designed for monitoring and improvement.
Hudson’s wearables do not frame the body as something to quantify or refine. Instead, sensing systems trigger changes in light, texture, and spatial response that remain perceptual rather than informational. That becomes especially visible in Lucent Body. Illuminated sculptural forms wrap around and extend from the body, combining embedded lighting, translucent materials, and wearable structure into objects that feel simultaneously anatomical and synthetic. Rather than treating electronics as separate technical infrastructure, Hudson folds responsive systems directly into the physical language of the piece.
Fabric plays an important role throughout this work. Textiles soften the hard visual logic typically associated with electronics and sensing systems, introducing tactility and bodily proximity into structures built from circuitry and light. The materials never fully resolve into either garment or machine.
The same tension runs through Anti-Surveillance Helmet, a speculative wearable examining the aesthetics and politics of visibility within networked surveillance systems. The helmet evokes both protective equipment and technological apparatus, exaggerating the body’s relationship to monitoring and exposure rather than attempting to hide it.
Like Pulse, the work keeps its technological structure materially legible. Electronic components remain visible within the object instead of disappearing behind frictionless industrial design. Hudson’s wearables consistently resist the visual language of seamless consumer technology, opting instead for layered surfaces, exposed systems, and visible construction.
Embodiment, Exposure, and Responsive Systems
Hudson’s work connects to a longer lineage of wearable and embodied electronic art practices that treat computation as a material condition rather than an invisible backend. Sensors, circuitry, textiles, and bodily movement operate together within the same physical structure. Hudson does not stage technology as spectacle. The interactions remain relatively minimal: pulses of light, exposed circuitry, responsive surfaces, shifting material conditions. Attention stays focused on the relationship between the body and the object rather than on immersive technical effects.
Across these projects, the body functions simultaneously as signal source, sensing surface, and physical interface. Physiological activity becomes visible through light and material response without collapsing entirely into metrics or data visualization. Her work does not reject sensing technologies, nor does it romanticize them. Instead, Hudson treats responsive systems as material structures capable of shaping perception through light, circuitry, touch, and bodily presence.
Hudson’s upcoming solo exhibition will open June 8 at Gallatin Galleries in New York City. Centered on wearable art and technology, the exhibition explores the body as a conduit between human, technological, and ecological systems — a theme running consistently throughout Hudson’s practice.
