[W]e know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord—for we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Corinthians 5:6–7 ESV) 

Over many months, artist Alyssa Coffin travelled out to Finland’s Rastila forest and built Silence Chamber. Coffin prepared this edifice by weaving together fallen trees and building a tent-like structure into the rocks nearby. The structure was made for visitors to crawl inside, one by one, and lie on the forest floor.

Antechamber, depicted here, was her attempt to manifest something of the remote Silence Chamber to the public in the city, within the walls of a gallery space.  

For St Paul, ‘the new creation, whose central feature is bodily resurrection, is being prepared and kept for us in heaven’ (Wright 2003: 369; cf. John 14:3). We cannot be in two places at once. We are either in the present life with the promise of what is to come, or in the future resurrection with the Lord.

Antechamber became a stand-in for the distant Silence Chamber, not through direct replication, but through igniting the bodily senses of visitors in ways that referred their imaginations onward to the other structure, far off in the depths of the forest.

The pitch-dark room contained ‘loosely translated topographical maps of the forest site, including a miniature model of the chamber made of woven branches’ (Coffin 2023a). Visitors moved through the space tracing their hands across leaves, rocks, branches, and soil, as a dim light faded briefly in and out every two minutes: creating fleeting and faint moments of visual revelation. Coffin’s recorded voice broke into the space with fragmented words and whispers.

Coffin is ‘interested in the darkness of the room dissolving boundaries of the inhabitant’s body and creating another kind of chamber where they were immersed in a different perception of time and space’ (Coffin 2023a).

Theologian John Hull, who experienced loss of sight from a young age, describes how the darkness in Scripture is redeemed and made holy (Hull 2001: 3). The disorientating experience of darkness is foundational to Coffin’s Antechamber, and its sister work Silence Chamber. As we live by faith not by sight, we sense our way through the world, feeling in the dark. Faith implies trust, as we look to promises which have not yet been fully revealed, and hope for a reality which we cannot see.

References

Coffin, Alyssa. 2023a. ‘Post Thesis Exhibition Greetings, Artist Newsletter, 7 October 2023’, available at https://us16.campaign-archive.com/?u=f9d1ab8a5827081235a609032&id=aab3f95ba7 [accessed 20 October 2023]

______. 2023b. ‘Antechamber Documentation’, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZyXgNndA0w [accessed 24 October 2023]

______. 2023c. ‘Silence Chamber’, available at https://noba.ac/et/kunst/silence-chamber/ [accessed 24 October 2023]

Hull, John. 2001. In The Beginning There Was Darkness (London: SCM Press)

Wright, N. T. 2003. The Resurrection of the Son of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press)