Kaki King has a hard time re-creating what she sees in her mind when she plays guitar.

Although she doesn’t necessarily identify as a synesthete, King has talked in interviews about how she associates specific colors, shapes or textures with musical tones or even her full albums (she’s expressed regret that her first album had a red cover, while the music suggested a blue-green hue to her). But the relationship isn’t one-to-one, she said.

“Sometimes, I see more shapes and textures than anything, but again, it’s the mind’s eye, so it’s not really very realistic,” she said recently from her home in Brooklyn. “It’d be really hard to create on paper or even in 3-D.”

Her latest solo show and accompanying album “The Neck is a Bridge to the Body,” which she will perform at the Tower Theatre on Saturday, is something of an attempt to do just that, however. The show, conceived in 2014 with visual effects company Glowing Pictures (Animal Collective, David Byrne & Brian Eno), features King using her guitar as a visual as well as aural canvas, with images and textures projecting onto the instrument in response to what she’s playing.

“I do have these associations, and I think that ideally, probably what’s happened is the way I’ve been playing the songs over time and the subtle adjustments that I make each night … I think that they start to match,” King said. “I’m not trying to make the song better; I’m trying to match better what I’m seeing. I’m trying to bring sight and sound just a little bit closer each time.

“It’s all about mood; it’s all about feeling,” she added. “You could describe the first 15 years of my career with that — mood and feeling. And so now, I’m just adding visuals into that mix to try to create an even bigger experience.”

Four years is a long time for King to focus on a project (the recorded version, her eighth studio album, was released in 2015). Alongside her adventurous and physically demanding playing, which makes frequent use of two-handed tapping techniques and percussive hits to the instrument’s body, King is known for her creative restlessness. Her solo career has touched on avant-garde jazz instrumentals, full-band rock freakouts, vocal songs and more, and she has collaborated with the Foo Fighters, Eddie Vedder, actor Sean Penn and The Mountain Goats, among others.

King has kept busy with other projects while touring “The Neck,” releasing “Live at Berklee,” recorded with a chamber orchestra featuring DeVotchKa’s Tom Hagerman, in August. In February she dropped another audio-visual project, “Bruises,” a collaboration with artist and data designer Giorgia Lupi inspired by King’s 3-year-old daughter who was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.

But “The Neck” got a second life a few years ago, when King’s new manager and agent focused on touring it in theaters as opposed to the bars and clubs King was accustomed to playing before. With the enhanced environment, King was able to open up her performance more.

“When I conceived the show, my role as a guitar player was intended to be diminished — so I was not lit, I was wearing sunglasses, I was behind-the-scenes, almost,” she said. “While I’ve maintained that characteristic of what I do, there’s a bit of play because I’m now using nonverbal body language and cues. And this is all very subtle, but some of it is effective to let the audience know that not only am I aware that they’re there, I’m a little bit confused as to why they’re there and I’m confused as to what I’m doing and why I’m there.”

The show focuses on the guitar as a character in its own right, with the instrument “expressing” itself through the visuals. King, who in 2007 was the youngest artist and only woman featured in Rolling Stone’s “The New Guitar Gods” list, picked up the instrument at age 4. Her relationship with the guitar has evolved numerous times over the years, but has always been at the forefront of how King expresses herself musically. “The Neck” is the latest representation of that relationship.

“I think that in the early part of my career, the relation that I had to the guitar was more antagonistic — like, oh, you bastard, you’ve done it again,” King said. “… I loved playing, but the guitar itself had a bit of an attitude, and I had an attitude towards it. And I think because by my early 20s, I had been playing guitar for 15 years, so I already had a relationship to the instrument — it was like having a twin or having something where my entire identity — my whole life — was wrapped up in it. So even in my early career, I was like, ‘Oh, you again. Great.’ And I think that by the time ‘The Neck’ — I mean, even by the time I was in my early 30s, it had become very apparent to me that the guitar was in control in a way that I couldn’t put words to, but I could certainly feel.”