Lyra.
LYRA, was a long-term project rooted in participatory engagement and a trauma-informed approach, exploring sound, music, and ritual as pathways for connection and healing.
About Lyra
LYRA was a long-term art and research project (2022–2024) led by Amanda Camenisch and Therese Westin, funded by Arts Council England and supported by Space Ilford, Metroland Cultures, the Swiss Church, and Montez Press Radio. It encompassed two exhibitions, multiple participatory performances, a radio programme, and a vinyl release.
More importantly, LYRA laid the foundations for the LYRA methodology, developed by Amanda Camenisch and Therese Westin, which continues to inform their collective participatory practice. Read more about the LYRA methodology here.
At its core, LYRA was about working with groups to find common ground through shared explorations of creation myths, planetary resonances, and symbolic tensions. Across a series of workshops held in refugee centres and women’s shelters around London (later moving to Space Ilford and Metroland Cultures as rehearsal spaces), participants engaged in sound, voice, improvisation, drawing, and movement. Out of these sessions, a collective vocabulary emerged, one that linked personal origins and cultural creation stories with embodied practices of release, healing, and spirituality.
The sound sculptures developed through LYRA were created with alchemical and esoteric imagery in mind, shaped by what arose in the workshops. Conceived as ceremonial objects, they channelled the elements of air, water, earth, fire, and aether. Their long tones and reverberations echoed traditions of sacred sound, functioning as portals or thresholds into different states of awareness.
The process placed particular emphasis on the body as an instrument opening energy centres or “gates” as described in ancient healing texts, and on connecting these to participants’ cultural memories, spiritual practices, and personal narratives. Through this, LYRA invited an exploration of belonging that moved beyond national or political frameworks, toward a larger sense of shared humanity.
As the project evolved, LYRA became a map of connections, resonances, and future possibilities: a constellation of experiences where past, present, and future could be woven together. Working with people from diverse cultural and ancestral backgrounds, the project created pathways across difference, forming a collective field in which everyone had an equal place. Like stars forming constellations, these connections allowed new images, movements, and sounds to emerge, culminating in a shared, co-created performance.
Listen to the radio programs Elemental Sounds here
Read the Lyra workbooks here
Sound Sculptures
The sound sculptures developed for Lyra emerged from a series of participatory workshops that explored the question of how we might cultivate deeper modes of listening, both to the world around us and to the silences within it. Drawing on alchemical approaches to sound and practices of sound healing, these instruments embody methodological investigations into the relationship between sonic experience, embodied awareness, and altered states of perception.
Central to this work was the co-creation with participants, many of whom came from refugee and migrant backgrounds and carried lived experiences of trauma. The emphasis was on grounding participants in the body and the senses, creating opportunities to experience the world somatically rather than solely cognitively. Tuning systems informed by the harmony of the spheres, pentatonic scales, and resonances reminiscent of animal and natural soundscapes were integrated into the instruments, allowing participants to explore sonic environments that connected both the earthly and the cosmological.
The workshops functioned as experimental spaces in which sound, voice, and improvisation could generate states of awareness, relaxation, wholeness, and remembrance. At the core of this process was the idea of creation, both in relation to mythologies of origin and as an ongoing act of embodied creativity. Through collective playing, participants engaged in intuitive and improvisational practices that revealed interconnections across diverse sonic lineages.
The resulting sound environments dissolved boundaries between individual contributions, as rhythms and resonances intersected to form a collective “cloud” of sound. Within this shared field, the separation of the individual gave way to a larger, co-created whole, an exploration of sound as both a practice of belonging and a medium for reimagining communal life.
