Sunny Jackson is a multidisciplinary 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 vast 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, chrome, 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, reflective surfaces, and light record time, hold attention, and shape encounter. Materials are approached not as inert components, but as active participants, each carrying its own logic, memory, and voice.

Her studio sculptures are one-of-a-kind forms composed through carving, layering, and reflection. Wood carries the trace of growth and duration; crystal refracts and preserves illumination as a kind of temporal architecture; reflective surfaces return image and light into space, drawing the viewer into the unfolding 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 perception. These inquiries now extend beyond the studio through her long-form project, Sourcelight – an evolving cultural artwork that expands sculpture into a decentralized field of collectible objects, participatory installations in natural environments, and an archive of human stories. Through sculptural artifacts known as Lumens and temporary constellations sited in real landscapes, Sourcelight proposes creation as a condition entered collectively rather than observed from a distance, forming a living network of collective witness and creative potential.

Across both bodies of work, 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?