Melissa Hyatt Foss is an interdisciplinary artist who co-creates with an ever-growing collection of sculptural musical instruments, including flutes, horns, trumpets, noise generators, bells, rattles, and whistling bottles, that she hand-crafts with clay.
Melissa’s work takes different forms: sculptural instruments with intuitive, microtonal tunings; improvised performances; electroacoustic compositions; and workshops and residencies with groups of all ages.
These different expressive channels allow her to explore themes of memory, kinship, and myth, as well as sound itself; its ability to induce altered states of consciousness and its power to generate collective moments of shared emotions and connection.
PH: Julieta Bilbao
Melissa was initiated into Pre-Columbian instrument-making under the tutelage of composer and educator Alejandro Iglesias Rossi and musicologist and educator Susana Ferreres, at the National University of Argentina at Tres de Febrero.
Within the framework of an innovative artistic-academic program, and as a soloist with the Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies, she learned to understand historic sound artifacts as cosmographic objects; vessels of visual, sonic, and energetic information that speak to us of other ways of seeing and being in the world.
After 12 years in Argentina, Melissa returned to the US, where her new work focuses on reimagining ancient instruments through the lens of personal narrative and regional mythology. Great Blue Heron, Timber Rattler, Sweet Gum Tree, Brain Coral; along the pathways worn deep by kinship in her own life, she reconnects with the touchstone of our common human heritage – where our inner wisdom still sings about the age-old truth of interconnectedness and mutual responsibility.
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Each instrument is unique and crafted by hand2026