Lyn Godley

For more than five decades, my work has explored how our experience of the visual world shapes human experience. Although the media have expanded—from painting and design to architectural light, immersive environments, and interdisciplinary research—the underlying inquiry has remained remarkably consistent: how changing visual relationships influence the way we experience ourselves, one another, and the environments we inhabit.

Beginning as a painter and later co-founding the internationally recognized design studio Godley-Schwan, I have crossed the boundaries of fine art, product design, furniture, lighting, and environmental design. It is represented in museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Brooklyn Museum, MUDE Design Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

My current practice extends painting through projected light, working with painting, light, rhythm, and time as interconnected artistic media. Rather than composing a sequence of images, I compose changing visual relationships that unfold gradually through time. The work asks not to be interpreted, but inhabited.

Questions that first emerged through studio practice naturally expanded into collaborations with neuroscientists, psychologists, physicians, architects, and designers. These collaborations led to the founding of the Jefferson Center for Immersive Arts for Health at Thomas Jefferson University, where artists and researchers investigated how slowly changing visual environments influence attention, mood, and the experience of time.