For all questions or purchase inquiries, please contact me at: alyssa@alyssacoffinart.com

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Alyssa Coffin is an interdisciplinary artist from New England, USA currently based in Helsinki, Finland. She graduated from Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, with studies in visual art as well as creative writing.  She has traveled widely, including a formative period in Ireland, focusing on environmental interventions and performances.  She recently completed her master’s in Time and Space Arts at Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts.  

Artist Statement: 

My work includes performance, moving image, and site-responsive installation using natural materials from the land. I often create primal structures with the intimate contact of my hands, for the body to remerge and be in dialogue with the earth. Silence is the ground for my practice of walking, attention, curiosity, sensory engagement, and writing/spoken word.

I’m interested in the intersection of human and nonhuman bodies as part of a relational ecosystem. My work explores the reflexivity of internal and external landscapes and spaces between, through themes such as time, silence, darkness, perception, and belonging.

My current research questions the predominance of visuality in our culture. I am developing practices of dismantling photographic seeing and restoring the autonomy of the body to be in direct relation with the world by using the body as a receptor. How might inscribing sensory images in the living medium of the body affect as opposed to digital images?

Overall, I explore what it means to be human as mind, body, and spirit, and seek to remerge human-nature into the body of Nature, our earth home.

Process:

Walking is my form of research. It is important for me to find diverse landscapes to walk in to observe new natural elements and make connections. It is also important that I walk every day in the same place where I live to cultivate relationship with place.

Writing is how I process the concepts in my work and follow threads of ideas into unexpected territories. My background in illustration and creative writing has given me an understanding of narrative and the use of metaphor to create meaningful fictions from real life experiences. Poetry is my method for encapsulating the ineffable.

Reading is what feeds my practice. I regularly absorb ideas from theology, ecology, mythology, and philosophy.