Forest of Souls

The Forest of Souls is a site specific installation in Tollefson Plaza, Tacoma, WA that serves a tribute to the region’s earliest inhabitants. This quiet work shines from the plaza’s reflecting pools at the busy downtown intersection of South 17th and Pacific Avenue, where a Puyallup Indian village once stood. Being a light based piece, it is best seen after the sun sets and darkness provides a backdrop for the slender bunches of fiber-optic cables that rise up from the terraced pools. Nestled in clusters under a concrete overhang that serves as a walkway to the local light rail, the purple, pink, yellow, white and green stalks, softly, unobtrusively, as their reflections seem to pulsate on the water’s rippling surface

“Though easy to overlook initially, once spotted, this work seems to extend an invitation to slow down and ponder the site’s history, and that of the Puyallup Indians who inhabited this area for thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers in the 19th century. “I wanted the light installation to give them voice in some silent, yet understood way,” says Proffitt.

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Proffitt is a busy artist on several fronts. She recently inaugurated an artists’ residency program, Starry Night, in the hot springs town of Truth or Consequences, NM, south of Albuquerque. She owns the property, which she discovered in 2000 while completing a research project on homeless services in the US for her undergraduate degree at the Evergreen Tacoma campus. “The town is really artsy and eccentric, and has a high ratio of artists per capita,” she says. “Everyone is an artist there, and I decided that artists from all over would really enjoy a chance to create in such a secluded, eccentric environment. So far it has turned out that I was right.” She says the residency program offers artists the opportunity “to make work, engage with local artists and the public, and show their work in [storefront] spaces” along the main street of downtown.” Spaceworks Tacoma Jan. 1, 2011