Sound Forest

Since 2021, I have been working in collaboration with composer and sound artist, Bruce Odland, on The Sound Forest, our collective response to being more in touch with nature.

A fusion of past and present via portals, each installation is site specific and calls upon all the senses. Discarded wood is transformed into 6-foot totems to celebrate the forest’s history and honor it as part of our disappearing natural world.

Our process is one of relentless sanding and oiling followed by the application of layers of encaustics to bring natural elements ‘back to life’. Layers of light-infused color in the scarred spaces combined with the circular shape of the cutout wood invite one inward and remind us of our place within the cycle of life.

Sound heightens the sensory experience and awakens memory as it imprints an important message about our present time. The hollowed-out craters hold and amplify audio recordings that murmur the sounds of the forest on all its levels at different times of day.

We are simultaneously sounding the alarm, expressing a last, desperate hope, and calling out for action.

Sound Forest 2025

Sound Forest / Between Worlds

Soli Pierce and Bruce Odland
Artists in Residence at Kino Saito, Verplank, NY
10 Jan - March 1, 2025
Exhibition Opening: March 8, 2025, 4 - 6pm
Exhibition runs through May 18, 2025

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Sound Forest 2024

Sound Forest / Memory Cave
The First Vault Project: A Celebration of the Environment

Janet Langsam Vault Project
Oct.13, 2024 - Jan. 12, 2025
ArtsWestchester Gallery, 31 Mamaroneck Ave., White Plains, NY

Bruce Odland and I are so honored to have been selected as the inaugural artists of ArtWestchester's Janet Langsam Vault Project. The Janet Langsam Vault Project seeks to create an opportunity for artists to experiment, expand their practice, and advance social change. The vault space presents an opportunity to change or shape an environment, and to create a thoughtful work that engages with important topics in the community. Thank you to so many of you who came out and joined us for the openings in October! A huge thank you to the ArtsWestchester team for their ongoing support of the Sound Forest/Memory Cave installation.

Past

Sound Forest: Songs of Disappearance

The Hammond Museum & Japanese Stroll Garden, North Salem, NY

May 25 - August 2024

Soli Pierce in collaboration with composer and sound artist Bruce Odland have created a site-specific installation for the Hammond Museum’s Japanese Stroll Garden. Five wood “totems” are placed in and around one of the garden’s dry stream beds situated next to the hill known as Mt. Fuji.

In this site specific installation, the totems are blackened by means of the Japanese technique shou sugi ban, whereby the wood is charred, then burnished with sandpaper and wire brushes, and finally sealed with a natural oil to create a biological yet dramatic appearance and texture. “Leaf Speakers” and a “Trunk Subwoofer” invented by Odland, play a haunting soundscape created by stretching a 1-second call of a Carolina Wren into a long “Song of Disappearance”. The scorched wooden parabolas focus the sound of the leaf speakers into beams emanating from the “Totems”, cutting across the garden’s landscape.