SEEING BREATHING (2024-)
Seeing Breathing is an ongoing experimental methodology that activates the visual, movement, and respiratory systems to encourage connectedness to the self and to others. Developed at the intersection of neuroscience, somatic practice, and meditation, the work seeks to create spaces of empathy through embodiment — unfolding across painting, sculpture, sound, performance, and guided meditation.
At its core is a recognition that the visual system — our most dominant sensory channel — offers an underexplored entry point into states of regulation, presence, and expanded awareness. By designing works that function simultaneously as art and as score, Seeing Breathing invites participants into embodied experience without requiring prior knowledge or practice. "Seeing" is understood here more broadly than optical perception alone: it encompasses inner sight, insight, and the kind of knowing that emerges when attention turns inward.
The project has grown out of a long-standing interest in how artistic frameworks can generate genuine physiological and psychological shifts — and a belief that these questions are best explored in dialogue with scientific inquiry. Increasingly, this has led the work toward care spaces: hospitals, clinics, nursing schools, and healthcare environments where patients, caregivers, and medical professionals navigate sustained physical and emotional demand.
Photo 1-2 Giulia Garetto, 2-4 Katie O’Neill.
Breathing score for Grove Neurology, Miami (2025)
Breathing Score for Grove Neurology (Miami, United States) was developed for neurologist Dr. Andrew Lerman, who commissioned a painting for his waiting room designed to support attention, grounding, and nervous system regulation in a clinical setting. The work takes the form of a visual breathing score — with the words INHALA and EXHALA tracing its continuous path — inviting patients and staff to follow the rhythm of their breath through the movement of their eyes.
The work emerged from a shared conviction that the waiting room, so often a space of anxiety and uncertainty, could be quietly transformed into a resource for self-regulation. Patients and staff reported unexpected moments of calm and focus when engaging with the work — observations that opened broader conversations about the role of intentionally designed artistic interventions within clinical environments, and about what it might mean to offer care through form, color, and attention.
Building on the impact of this work, the artist is now collaborating with Dr. Lerman to explore the possibility of expanding these principles into a larger public artwork for the surrounding hospital complex — a visual meditation path that would bring the same invitation to breathe and reconnect out of the waiting room and into the shared outdoor spaces of the community.
seeing breathing activations archive
glogauair open studios, 2024
Participants were invited to synchronize their breathing and movements in attunement with others. The artworks were activated with a collaborative sound work by Kaj Schlicht and Jamie Denburg Habie that invited two or more people to synchronize their heartbeats through shared breathing. For more on that collaboration, please click here.
Activations occurred over two days in September, 2024 at GlogauAIR in Berlin. Photo Giulia Garetto.
I Inhale You Exhale (Score for Breathing With Another) is a collaborative sound work by Kaj Schlicht and Jamie Denburg Habie that invites two or more people to synchronize their heartbeats through shared breathing. Intended as a standalone work and a complement to paintings in the Seeing Breathing series alike, the track guides participants to breathe in for five seconds and out for five, following a breathwork pattern known as “coherence breathing.” This practice activates the parasympathetic nervous system, promoting a state of calm and receptivity.
As participants breathe together, their heart rates may lower in unison, inviting an exploration of the boundaries of self through attunement to the body of another. The sound work alternates between spoken breathing cues, recordings of inhales and exhales, and ambient soundscapes, subtly playing with language and meaning: by repeatedly hearing the phrase “I inhale, you exhale” while breathing in unison, the distinction between “I” and “you” begins to blur.
GLOGAUAIR SEEING BREATHING PRACTICE, 2024
Participants took part in a Seeing Breathing practice led by Jamie Denburg Habie and Gerjet Efken, co-founder of Inner Space Breath. The 1.5-hour journey flowed through movement, breathing exercises, and guided meditation designed to catalyze a state of connectedness to oneself, others, and the surroundings.
Central to the session was an expanded understanding of sight — not only as external perception, but as a bridge between inner experience and the world. Drawing on non-traditional cues that combine visual attention, breath, and subtle shifts in awareness, the guided meditation invited participants to dissolve perceived boundaries between self and environment: melting awareness into air, into surrounding materials, into the broader biological and elemental systems we are part of. Rather than turning attention away from the world, the practice used vision and breath as pathways toward a deeper sense of belonging within it — foregrounding forms of interconnectedness that exist across beings, physical processes, and the living world.
