Cymatics REsearch
The invisible is not empty
This formative body of research work began with an inquiry into the active creative influence of sound vibration: how specific frequencies move through matter, how water and particulate surfaces respond, and how geometry can emerge from forces that are otherwise invisible.
Daily moments
Five Twenty-Eight
Five Twenty-Eight; Karen Hansen (2019); Acrylic, PVC, French glass stain on canvas
Sold, Private Collector
Five Twenty Eight was created during the final year of my art degree, through an enquiry into cymatics and the visible architectures of resonance.
The work takes its title from 528Hz, a frequency often described within Solfeggio traditions as the tone of love, healing and miracles. I became interested in the way this frequency, when fed into water and captured through light, has produced a phyllotaxis spiral: a form also found in sunflower heads, pinecones, seed pods and other natural structures. The psychedelic colour field references 1960s countercultural aesthetics and the “peace and love” mantra of the hippie era, while gesturing toward the luminous sacred geometries reported across altered states, transcendental meditation and cross-religious mystical experience.
Using acrylic, PVC and French glass stain, I built the work as a dimensional field rather than a flat image. The raised cuts, translucent colour, metallic shadows and shifting surface create a pattern that changes as the viewer moves, casting new stories against the technicolour ground. This interplay between light and form is central to my textural and sculptural practice. The artwork is never only what I place upon it. It continues to make itself in relationship with shadow, reflection, angle, atmosphere and the body of the viewer.
The work takes its title from 528Hz, a frequency often described within Solfeggio traditions as the tone of love, healing and miracles. I became interested in the way this frequency, when fed into water and captured through light, has produced a phyllotaxis spiral: a form also found in sunflower heads, pinecones, seed pods and other natural structures. The psychedelic colour field references 1960s countercultural aesthetics and the “peace and love” mantra of the hippie era, while gesturing toward the luminous sacred geometries reported across altered states, transcendental meditation and cross-religious mystical experience.
Using acrylic, PVC and French glass stain, I built the work as a dimensional field rather than a flat image. The raised cuts, translucent colour, metallic shadows and shifting surface create a pattern that changes as the viewer moves, casting new stories against the technicolour ground. This interplay between light and form is central to my textural and sculptural practice. The artwork is never only what I place upon it. It continues to make itself in relationship with shadow, reflection, angle, atmosphere and the body of the viewer.
“Cymatics allows us to witness the microcosm: the ancient idea of being one with the universe made visible through sound, water and light.“
— Karen Hansen, 2018.
Listen (2017)
Listen; Karen Hansen (2017); 200 Year old silk, thread, Polymer, Glass.
Available on Enquiry
Created during the first year of my Art Degree, Listen explores the interrelationship of all things through sound, pattern, water, and ancestral material.
The work is derived from the visible cymatic pattern of whale song, drawing on the spiritual and ecological significance of whales as beings who move between depth, breath, land, and sea. Their song becomes a point of entry into a wider meditation on vibration as a generative force: sound as structure, frequency as pattern, and sacred geometry as a language carried through human artistry across time and culture.
The base cloth is indigo silk, approximately 200 years old, handmade by my great-great-grandparents. Its deep blue surface holds the feminine element of water, ancestral memory, and vibrational movement. Through stitching, the textile becomes both field and current, carrying pattern as a form of listening.
Listen brings together mind and emotion, geometry and intuition, masculine and feminine energies, visible order and creative flow. It proposes cymatic resonance as a scientific, spiritual and material reminder of oneness.
The work is derived from the visible cymatic pattern of whale song, drawing on the spiritual and ecological significance of whales as beings who move between depth, breath, land, and sea. Their song becomes a point of entry into a wider meditation on vibration as a generative force: sound as structure, frequency as pattern, and sacred geometry as a language carried through human artistry across time and culture.
The base cloth is indigo silk, approximately 200 years old, handmade by my great-great-grandparents. Its deep blue surface holds the feminine element of water, ancestral memory, and vibrational movement. Through stitching, the textile becomes both field and current, carrying pattern as a form of listening.
Listen brings together mind and emotion, geometry and intuition, masculine and feminine energies, visible order and creative flow. It proposes cymatic resonance as a scientific, spiritual and material reminder of oneness.
Mereon I and II (2018)
Mereon I and II; Karen Hansen (2018); Polymer, Metal and Mica
Mereon I and II are small dimensional studies exploring the invisible architectures that underlie form.
Developed through my research into cymatics, these works respond to the Mereon Matrix: a proposed energetic structure concerned with pattern, vibration, geometry, and the generative space between visible forms. Mereon I and II reflect my early inquiry into the unseen forces that shape matter, perception, and creative emergence. They ask what exists beneath visible pattern, and how even the invisible may be layered, structured, and alive
Developed through my research into cymatics, these works respond to the Mereon Matrix: a proposed energetic structure concerned with pattern, vibration, geometry, and the generative space between visible forms. Mereon I and II reflect my early inquiry into the unseen forces that shape matter, perception, and creative emergence. They ask what exists beneath visible pattern, and how even the invisible may be layered, structured, and alive
Chladni (2018)
Chladni; Karen Hansen (2018); Wood, Metal, Resin.
Sold, Private Collector.
Created during my art degree in 2018, this wearable sculpture references the geometric formations made visible through Chladni plate experiments, where vibration gathers loose particles into patterns of resonance and harmonic order.
Monad (2017)
Monad; Karen Hansen (2017); Acrylic and metal leaf on reversed stretched canvas.
Available on Enquiry
This early painting was the direct precursor to my discovery of cymatics, and one of my first steps toward what would later become my Art Alchemy practice.
Made during my art degree, the work emerged from an intuitive interest in sacred geometry, ancestral mark-making and the mystery of unseen forces. At the centre is the Monad: the circled dot, an ancient symbol associated with the Sun, alchemical gold, unity and the first principle of creation.
Within the dark field, it appears as a solar seed emerging from the void, the first point of light held inside the wholeness of the circle. The form also echoes the cup and ring marks of my Pictish ancestors, connecting pre-Christian mark-making traditions with a deeper search for origin, vibration and sacred design.
This early painting was the direct precursor to my discovery of cymatics, and one of my first steps toward what would later become my Art Alchemy practice.
Made during my art degree, the work emerged from an intuitive interest in sacred geometry, ancestral mark-making and the mystery of unseen forces. At the centre is the Monad: the circled dot, an ancient symbol associated with the Sun, alchemical gold, unity and the first principle of creation.
Within the dark field, it appears as a solar seed emerging from the void, the first point of light held inside the wholeness of the circle. The form also echoes the cup and ring marks of my Pictish ancestors, connecting pre-Christian mark-making traditions with a deeper search for origin, vibration and sacred design.
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Seed (2019)
Seed; Karen Hansen (2019); Acrylic, Harakeke Seed Pods, Raffia on Canvas.
Available on Enquiry
Seed emerged after a traditional Pachamama ceremony held with a wisdom keeper from the Andean Mountains.
During the ceremony, offerings of flowers, seeds, leaves, fruit, and personal intention were laid together in a sacred mandala. Each element was held with gratitude, heart energy, and prayer, before being bundled and released into fire. I was struck by the way these earthly materials became flame, smoke, heat, and unseen offering. Their physical forms disappeared, yet their energy continued.
This work carries that moment of transformation. Built from harakeke seed pods gathered from the land of Rotorua, Seed draws on the sacred geometry of the Seed of Life while allowing irregularity, rupture, and human imperfection to remain visible. Its structure reaches toward cosmic order, but its surface belongs to lived experience.
The painted seed pods hold tones of light within darkness, connecting the work to my concurrent body of work, Project Taniwha. Here, fire is not only destruction. It is passage, release, and necessary beginning. Seed reflects on the mystery that some forms of life only open after burning, and that transformation often asks us to surrender one state of being before another can emerge.
During the ceremony, offerings of flowers, seeds, leaves, fruit, and personal intention were laid together in a sacred mandala. Each element was held with gratitude, heart energy, and prayer, before being bundled and released into fire. I was struck by the way these earthly materials became flame, smoke, heat, and unseen offering. Their physical forms disappeared, yet their energy continued.
This work carries that moment of transformation. Built from harakeke seed pods gathered from the land of Rotorua, Seed draws on the sacred geometry of the Seed of Life while allowing irregularity, rupture, and human imperfection to remain visible. Its structure reaches toward cosmic order, but its surface belongs to lived experience.
The painted seed pods hold tones of light within darkness, connecting the work to my concurrent body of work, Project Taniwha. Here, fire is not only destruction. It is passage, release, and necessary beginning. Seed reflects on the mystery that some forms of life only open after burning, and that transformation often asks us to surrender one state of being before another can emerge.
Fallen Universe (2018)
.Sold - Private collector
Fallen Universe; Karen Hansen (2018); 200yr old silk, glass, velvet, wire.
Fallen Universe is a wearable sculptural work from HALO, a sub-collection exploring adornment as relic, crown, vessel, and threshold object.
The work is fabricated from silk handmade by my ancestors in Denmark circa 1820. Dyed with indigo at the time of its making, the delicate cloth, which I have hand-stitched, carries material history and ancestral presence. Its surface suggests a night sky: rippled, darkened, and scattered with star-like markings, as though holding a cosmology within the fabric itself.
Fallen Universe draws on the alchemical principle As Above, So Below. The celestial is brought down into cloth, body, and hand. The universe becomes intimate, ancestral, and wearable.
Enlightenment (2018)
Enlightenment; Karen Hansen (2018); Textile, Metal, Crystal, ink and glass
Sold; Private Collection
From my 2018 subcollection HALO | Sculptural Headwear
Referencing the glamour of 1920s headdress forms, the work traces a visual lineage through Western mysticism, ritual adornment, and cultural shifts in sacred symbolism. Cymatic medallions, printed in ink on textile, sit within intricate beadwork, suggesting matter coming into coalescence through vibration of sounded intent.
The halo form is present, but disrupted. Rather than offering a fixed symbol of purity or transcendence, the work unsettles the halo, allowing it to become fractured, embodied, and human.
Enlightenment explores the disrupted halo as a symbol of forgotten power. It asks what has been cast down, exiled, or misunderstood within humanity, especially within the feminine experience of the world, and what might be reclaimed when beauty, shadow, divinity, and embodiment are allowed to coexist.
The halo form is present, but disrupted. Rather than offering a fixed symbol of purity or transcendence, the work unsettles the halo, allowing it to become fractured, embodied, and human.
Enlightenment explores the disrupted halo as a symbol of forgotten power. It asks what has been cast down, exiled, or misunderstood within humanity, especially within the feminine experience of the world, and what might be reclaimed when beauty, shadow, divinity, and embodiment are allowed to coexist.
Luminary (2018)
Luminary; Karen Hansen (2018); Textile, Metal, Polymer.
From my sub-collection HALO | Sculptural Headwear
Available on Enquiry
Luminary is a wearable sculptural work grounded in cymatic form and structure.
The work draws on the idea that vibration, thought, and matter participate in the same field of creation. Its form suggests the visible architecture of frequency, where sound, water, body, and cosmos enter into relationship.
Through this piece, I was exploring the human being as a living mirror of the universe. Made of water, mineral, electrical impulse, and breath, we are not separate from celestial forces. The sun, moon, stars, and electromagnetic fields, are part of the same living architecture that moves through the body.
Luminary proposes human radiance, and energetic co-creative exchange: the celestial held within the terrestrial, the universe made intimate through the body and soul.
The work draws on the idea that vibration, thought, and matter participate in the same field of creation. Its form suggests the visible architecture of frequency, where sound, water, body, and cosmos enter into relationship.
Through this piece, I was exploring the human being as a living mirror of the universe. Made of water, mineral, electrical impulse, and breath, we are not separate from celestial forces. The sun, moon, stars, and electromagnetic fields, are part of the same living architecture that moves through the body.
Luminary proposes human radiance, and energetic co-creative exchange: the celestial held within the terrestrial, the universe made intimate through the body and soul.
Mundane (2018)
These brooches were created as a small batch of wearable sculptures for VIP guests at Harmony Rangimarie, a high-end fashion experience I produced in 2018.
Each piece carries an impression of sacred geometry, referencing cymatic vibration patterns. Yet the forms were not made through specialist tools. They were pressed into polymer using ordinary, domestic and beauty-related objects: a nail polish bottle, buttons, a plastic rose, and other small fragments of everyday life.
At the time, I was deeply interested in where cymatic pattern appears within human design. I was looking for the sacred inside the ordinary object: the ancient geometry hidden within the things we touch without thinking.
Each piece carries an impression of sacred geometry, referencing cymatic vibration patterns. Yet the forms were not made through specialist tools. They were pressed into polymer using ordinary, domestic and beauty-related objects: a nail polish bottle, buttons, a plastic rose, and other small fragments of everyday life.
At the time, I was deeply interested in where cymatic pattern appears within human design. I was looking for the sacred inside the ordinary object: the ancient geometry hidden within the things we touch without thinking.