Singer-songwriter Jewel has long given voice to heartbreak, longing and emotional resilience on guitar and piano. Now she’s added a new musical instrument to her repertoire — one she made herself, though you won’t hear her playing it. She created it specifically for the ocean.

The instrument isn’t built from wood or strings. It’s an 8-foot kinetic sculpture called “Heart of the Ocean” that translates real-time open-source oceanographic data into an original soundscape that responds to the Atlantic Ocean’s ebbs and flows. In tandem, 60,000 points of programmable light emit vivid, color-changing patterns that reflect the sea’s rhythms, and those of the creatures that live beneath its surface.

“If you happen to be in front of the sculpture on the high tide… there will be a very specific, very different sound and light feature,” the four-time Grammy nominee, born Jewel Kilcher, said in a phone interview. “Same with the full moon. Same with cloud data. Nature is changing all the time, and it was important that you feel that and notice that.”

“Heart of the Ocean” will debut in Italy on May 7 alongside the 2026 Venice Biennale, and will remain on display at the city’s Salone Verde through November 22. It’s part of Matriclysm: An Archaeology of Connections Lost , a larger solo show of Jewel’s visual art that incorporates painting, sculpture and tapestry exploring feminine power and the costs of suppressing it, as well as our relationship with the environment.

“I like to think I’m really giving nature a voice, a way of relating to you,” the musician said of “Heart of the Ocean.” Her most recognizable hits include “You Were Meant for Me,” “Foolish Games” and “Who Will Save Your Soul,” all from her 1995 debut album Pieces of You , which sold more than 12 million copies.

For “Heart of the Ocean,” the multiplatinum artist worked with scientists from NASA, NOAA, U.C. Berkeley and Stanford University to select and interpret data on everything from currents and precipitation to salinity, seismic activity, wave height and wildlife migratory patterns. She then assigned musical algorithms to create a narrative arc.

With vast repositories of datasets to choose from, Jewel and her team sought patterns with rhythm, intensity and fluctuations, said Chelle Gentemann, a program scientist in NASA’s office of the chief science data officer who collaborated with Jewel on the piece.

“Ocean temperature anomalies have peaks and troughs, acceleration and stillness,” said Gentemann, who’s on assignment at NASA from the International Computer Science Institute.

To represent those variations, Jewel attached the sounds of breath and a heartbeat to temperature data, with the tempo shifting according to the warmth or chill of the currents.

“The colder we got, the slower we would get,” she said.

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.”