On Curiosity: An Interview with Ava Hudson
Photography by Ava Filan
Ava Hudson does not treat curiosity as a starting point: rather, she treats it as the whole practice. Ideas arrive and she moves toward them by testing materials, building forms, and learning whatever she needs to along the way. There is no predetermined medium, no fixed discipline—rather, just a question, and the commitment to follow it wherever it leads.
Hudson credits much of her practice to her upbringing. With an educational background that integrated the arts and sciences, she learned that research can be imaginative and creative work can be rigorous. Her parents kept the house in a constant state of experimentation, teaching her to build around what she didn't already know.
Hudson’s practice spans wearable art-tech, biomaterial research & development, and speculative design. Thematically, she is consistently drawn to complex systems—artificial, biological, natural—that are often too small, too large, or too hidden to easily see, but that shape how we live and interact with the world. Her work brings curiosity and wonder to life, answering questions most of us never think to ask out loud. At the center of her practice is a belief that artists and technologists are engaged in the same fundamental act: imagining what could exist, then building it into reality. For Hudson, the most interesting work happens when the two are in collaboration; when artists and technologists unite to ask and answer questions together.
In her latest piece, PULSE, she takes a constant but hidden signal of the body, the heartbeat, and carries it outward. A pair of 3D-printed brain hemispheres gilded with gold leaf magnetically snap together to form a bag, activating a custom circuit board. This connection triggers heartbeat sensors attached to the wrist to transmit the beat through LED wires embedded in the garment. A real-time translation of the pulse is shown through light.
The material logic matters. Electronic waste and luxury crystals occupy the same surface not to create dissonance, but to dissolve a boundary. At its core, PULSE asks what happens to emotion as we fuse biology with technology. The pulse, usually private, becomes shared, moving beyond the body into space. Rather than flattening feeling, the work proposes that technology might amplify it: extending emotion across systems, allowing it to travel, to be seen, to exist simultaneously within and beyond the self.
When asked how she feels about the influx of referentialism and copying within the arts, Hudson expressed that referencing her work would be a sign that her approach resonates, and she actively welcomes this. If others riff off her work, she doesn't experience that as loss, rather as movement. “Copying can be useful; it tests what resonates, spreads ideas, and can accelerate cultural momentum around ideas,” she proposes. “What matters to me is that creators are thinking critically about what they are making and why.” Hudson’s work finds its way into the world, and the conversation continues without her needing to control where it goes.
In navigating the magazine’s theme of mechanical reproduction and modern creativity in this issue, EMBODIED found interdisciplinary artist Ava Hudson to manifest this entirely. In the age of referentialism, nostalgia, and our attention economy, curiosity remains central to creation. Hudson’s work feels genuinely alive—rooted in the body, open to the world, and made with the particular kind of attention that can only come from someone who never stopped asking what else might be possible.
Hudson’s work will be featured in a solo show at the Gallatin Galleries from June 8th through July 24th. Her work can also be found on instagram @avahudsonlab, and online at https://www.avahudsonlab.com/.