Alyssa Coffin ^{Emerging artist}

Artist's country of origin: Finland

I am an interdisciplinary artist from the USA currently finishing my master’s in Time and Space Arts at Uniarts, Helsinki. My practice is a response to specific environments by collaborating with animate materials such as branches sourced from the site. I weave structures for the mind, body and spirit 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. My thesis work began with building a chamber out of woven branches in a public forest near my home funded by a special grant from my university. From November through early June, I hosted visits to the site. I invited each participant to inhabit the structure with me and be guided through a series of practices involving sensory exploration, imagination, and silence. This past May, I exhibited a participatory installation (composed of forest matter, a sensory touch-scape and poetic soundscape) in Kuvan Kevät master’s exhibition along with a series of participatory performances with a woven branch structure. In conjunction, I hosted a series of practice sharing workshops in my forest research site about body as receptor/camera funded by a grant from Paulon Säätiön. The experiences and reflections from my work with the silence chamber, participants, and the forest site, were all recorded in a handwritten journal and I am now in the process of formulating them into a book.