Silence Chamber, woven birch, rowan and aspen branches, fallen snow (sometimes melting), visits facilitated for participatory interaction, forest in Rastila, East Helsinki, dimensions intentionally unknown, 2022-23

The silence Chamber in Rastila forest is a project emergent from my response to the land near where I live and my growing relationship with the site. The chamber is woven from branches fallen from the trees on the site. It merges with the rocks and its shape was determined by preexisting forms. Its state is continually altered by shifting elements of changing seasons.

The chamber evolves by people inhabiting it. It is a place to crawl back inside the earth, rest your eyes from visual stimulation and the business of the mind, and cultivate internal silence. The chamber becomes a holding space. Sometimes this is a space for imaginings or memories to surface or a darkness out of which images can emerge. It is a timeless space because we detach from tracking and let ourselves sink.

This project is about intimate relating to the earth and our own mind, body and spirit. The practices we activate together begin with silence­– listening inside and outside. They grow out of the silence into a dialogue with each other and the forest.

To have a guided or co-facilitated experience, schedule a session by emailing me at alyssacoffin11@gmail.com. Or, visit the chamber, lie inside, and create your own experience (coordinates in the instructions). Please read these instructions before visiting.

Listen to a spoken word “image” to take an imagined journey to the chamber: https://youtu.be/HJG-gwvWEtM

Sample pages from the Silence Chamber journal. I recorded in my own handwriting what was emerging from participation with the site: chamber happenings, what I was learning from the forest, stories from session with participants, and my personal reflections.

film stills credit: Martin Dūsek

Live audience, incidental construction workers and truck marked DELETE, tree bark made into rope, 2023

This piece was a response to Stansvik forest as part of Metsärauha activist movement against logging and construction in this old growth forest.

Woven branch structure for two heads, 100cm x 50cm x 50cm, participatory performance, 2023
Participants were invited to pick up one end and place the structure on their head with me. Then I would count to three, and together we would take a deep breath and close our eyes. Subtle shifts of weight became a bodily listening and responding. In a later performance, I invited listeners to close their eyes and allow my words elicit images in their mind.

View video documentation HERE

Live audience performance in Nida, Lithuania, 2023

Participants were asked in advance to write thoughts about their understanding of "shyness" on a piece of paper. Then the group was led on a silent walk through the forest and into the dunes, all the while passing the slips of paper quietly between them. When they arrived at the site where i was naked and lying in a hole in the sand, they were led on the upper perimeter of the dune in a circle around me. They were asked to look at me indirectly or "just shy of" my performance. By seeing me in their periphery, it was my intention that they don't just witness a human figure, but a context- a shy gaze expanding their viewpoint into an interrelated perception of the vast the landscape, their own walking body, the people walking in front of them, and my isolated, vulnerable body below.

Shyness has a unique way of attending to the spaces between; of seeing all the unspoken words and feeling the charged air of emotional bodies. Often in a state of shyness myself, I have experienced how every move i make and word i speak can feel like a silent, clumsy elephant. My presence and actions feel paradoxically both crudely mammoth and invisible to those around me. All the while, there is my critical, internal eye. I wanted to place myself in this uncomfortable state of shyness through my performance in a way that would illustrate it in confronting terms.

Once the participants had completed the circle around me, they were invited to walk up to me in the ditch. For the duration of their walk i had been frantically trying to hide myself, face buried into the ground, by using my flailing limbs to move the sand to cover my body. The invitation was for them to whisper to me a line from one of the papers or something they wanted to share with me about shyness. Few people approached me and let me in to the thoughts that has been exchanged amongst the group on their walk. This reticence both perhaps demonstrated their own shyness, while also making visible how a shy person is so easily ostracized, especially in a extroverted social cutlure and herd mentality.

performance and audio essay playing in forest, a dead tree, blueberry juice, paper, 2022

View clip of performance HERE and listen to audio essay HERE

live audience participatory performance for Sustainable Visual Arts Day, 2024

2-hour performance in Helsinki Art Museum and accompanying published essay, 2022

View and read Experiments in Viewing: The Dialogical Dance of Art that “Happens”

Participatory installation: forest matter, sensory touch-scape, poetic soundscape, 2023

This work was my solution for distilling the essence of my primary thesis work, Silence Chamber, in a forest site into the gallery space without using photo documentation. The dioramas are loosely translated topographical maps of the forest site. Their surfaces were designed not for aesthetic appearance, but specifically for touch as the primary sense through which the artwork was "read" and "seen." The pitch-dark room was filled with sounds from the forest and every 2 minutes a dim light came on and then quickly faded. With it came my voice performing fragmented poetic texts: all words derived from the Silence Chamber journal. The spoken words were a way to elicit imagination, inviting haptic thoughts. The concepts imbedded speak to the nature of touch, time, perception, silence and darkness.

view video documentation HERE

Video projection installation, 30 mins standing still at golden hour on April 11th, June 16th and July 6th  - letting my skin be a canvas, 2021

The video begins with all three frames in high-speed time lapse and ends with the middle frame standing alone, undazzled by light and shadows, in real time.

Tulip poplar bark, tulip poplar branch, 2021, 5’x8’x2” (wall portion)

Viewers are invited to twist the bark coming off the tree branch and add pieces of fiber to extend it into the gallery space.

The minutes and hours of time spent twisting bark into rope were recorded and written on the wall next to each line of rope.

Moss, sand and dirt from my backyard mixed with Portland cement, water

*Take off your shoes and place your feet in my footprints to view the pool

a. This Day, replete soil from Beardsley Community Farm, native grass and wildflower seeds, sunlight and water
*Please water me (use spray bottle in the corner)

b. This Day, depleted soil from garden in Kodak, TN, dead grass, dark room

Clay from land near my studio, apple cores and stems

*Gently blow on the apple cores to make them spin, touch and crumble the fallen clay between your fingers

Soil, QR codes for videos: 15 mins buried in ground on February 24th, March 11th, March 22nd, April 27th, May 20th, and June 16th, 2021
*Scan one of the codes to retrieve the video from the corresponding date, carry it with you while it plays on your phone throughout your time in the gallery

Video, iPhone, tree stump, limestone ground to a powder

*Kneel to pull the phone out of the tree stump and cradle it in your hand

Performance video montage, 35.5 minutes on loop,

*View by sitting or standing on one of the stumps

Video screen of performance, tree from property burned in 2016 fire, 2018-19, 8”x80”x8”

 Sublunary Embrace (video)

Video performance (embraced for duration of muscle’s limits), duration 1:43, 2018-19

View HERE

Natural clay sourced from Gatlinburg, apple stems and seeds, 2019, Dimensions variable

Leaf skeletons, 2020

This fragile frame that upholds you, the offing where body meets sky. Lest you forget the half that is but whisper.

video screen, frame, leaf skeleton, wind, 2020

Beneath our ephemeral skeletons, tattooing the ground with our frenzied shadows.

2022, video stills and photo documentation, resulting from 1-month immersion in spot in Helsinki forest Head sculpture: birch branches, cattails, ermine moth silk, approx. 12”x12”x13”

Woven branch structure for two heads, 100cm x 50cm x 50cm, participatory performance, 2023

Participants were invited to pick up one end and place the structure on their head with me. Then I would count to three, and together we would take a deep breath and close our eyes. Subtle shifts of weight became a bodily listening and responding. In a later performance, I invited listeners to close their eyes and allow my words elicit images in their mind.

View video documentation HERE

Building and then melting through an ice wall, performative act with artist Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen, 2023

racing against the shifting temperatures in Mustavuori caves

bamboo, hand split rivercane, sinew, yucca, and video documentation of performance in the French Broad River, 5 hours of floating,

2021, sculpture: 9’x7’x1’

View video HERE

assembled burned sticks, 2019, 62”x65”x24”

video stills- putting on the "Scaffolding," merging with the landscape

Video performance (embraced for duration of muscle’s limits), duration 1:43, 2018-19

body, thorns, repetitive action, 2017

ground limestone, human ashes, wind, 2017

rocks, body, duration, 2017

cliff, vines cut away, body clinging, 2017

One photo a week during COVID lockdown for Image Journal

performance to camera, 2023

with collaborator Raphael Beau

performance to camera, 2020

performance to camera, 2021

music: Andy Jarema

performance to camera, 2019

performance to camera, 2021

sound: Andy Jarema

Video projection installation, 30 mins standing still at golden hour on April 11th, June 16th and July 6th  - letting my skin be a canvas, 2021

The video begins with all three frames in high-speed time lapse and ends with the middle frame standing alone, undazzled by light and shadows, in real time.

This is the dance film that shouldn't have been. I compiled this piece out of the footage that we took on the day it was too cloudy to shoot for THE dance film, the idea I had in mind. It was born out of acceptance of nature's inconvenience and by pressing into a barrier as an opportunity to just play. What I didn't realize until after, was that playing means expanded potential. As I allowed the constructed vision in my mind to dissolve, I followed the language of my body into new territory. The title is "Reticence" because I developed the vocabulary of movements with the idea of slowness, restraint and attention to detail. A mediation on what it means to practicing silence. I went into it suspecting that there was just much "dance" in a small movement of my hand as in high-energy choreography. I believe intention and emotion behind a movement is its power, not its showy athleticism- its appearance of being skilled or active. There is so much pressure in our culture to always be moving, to stay busy and be productive. For me, my movements are a reminder that when we slow down, attach ourselves to less and chose the way we move through the world with mindfulness, we are empowered to live "on the edge" (much like I was dancing on a quarry block with a good 15 ft drop below). We retain our balance when our still point comes from within.

Matte gel medium skin, photo transfer, 2020, 39" x 59" x 2"

Gel medium photo documentation transfer, 2019

Fallen tree, body rubbed with clay earth, wind

44“x 78”x2”

Gel medium photo documentation transfer, 2019

scaffolding sculpture, landscape after the fire, wind

72”x50”x2”

Matte gel medium skin, photo transfer, 2020

Matte gel medium skin, photo transfer, 2020

Matte gel medium skin, photo transfer, 2018

16”x 36.5” x1.5”

Matte gel medium skin, photo transfer, 2018

22”x 32” x.5”

Matte gel medium skin, photo transfer, 2019

22”x 32” x2”

matte gel medium, photo transfer, 2018,

Matte gel medium skin, photo transfer, 2019

Remergence is a self-published book. It is a curated compilation of the artwork I created in 2017. It is primarily a juxtaposing of my tree sculpture series made in Providence, Rhode Island and my performative sculpture series made while in residency at the Burren College of Art in Ireland. Accompanying poetic statements reveal and connect themes throughout, giving my viewers an access point to my narrative direction.

62 pages, hardcover, perfect bound, 7x11 in

Limited run additions are available for $65 (+ $3.50 shipping) or the PDF can be purchased for a donation of any amount. Please email me for details about ordering.

Stand on reflected mystery. 

With crowning sight, question every wall

into a window. 

Curious to learn more about what led me to generate the artwork, more about the personal narrative it holds, and some of the struggles I faced while creating it? Listen to this podcast-style interview with me about the project!

Remergence Interview