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ABOUT
Mary Edwards is a composer and environmental sound artist whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses themes of temporality, impermanence, nostalgia and the natural world that recur throughout her work. She is interested in the invisible architecture and the emotive, historic, cinematic and spatial properties of sound. Listening is an inherent and integral part of her process in conveying how all sounds have the potential to be habitable, and can be transformative once you get inside them, as they are simultaneously intimate and immense.
Throughout 2023, Mary Edwards' current work-in-progress, Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place, has been performed and installed in several iterations at Spitsbergen Artist Gallery/Svalbard, Open Source Gallery/Brooklyn, Epsilon Spires/Vermont and the Beyond Listening International Symposium on Sonic Ecologies/Budapest.
Drawing partly on sound as a vibrational phenomenon and Space Analogues, this immersive compositional soundscape with cinematic audio, is, according to Edwards, “an ode rather than an elegy” to the transforming Arctic landscape, climate vulnerability, elemental sensuality and terrestrial/space connectivity.
Edwards began this project in Autumn 2022 while sailing on an artist and scientist research expedition above the 78th Parallel to Svalbard (halfway between Norway and the North Pole) to make field recordings and listen to the rhythm and breath of our planet from another pulse point. She documented sound properties of glacial geology and oceanographic data through sonification with geophones, hydrophones and contact microphones, recording the distinct groans and reverberant calving ice tumbling from the sublime glacier walls into the depths of fjords, the movement of subterranean rivers, Beluga whale song and vocal intonations intended to provide access for all by “de-centralizing the centered and un-othering the others.”
Her recent projects include Fathom, a site-related soundscape launched during the 2023 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) Conference, Listening Pasts/Listening Futures and Conservation/Conversation, both for Atlantic Center for the Arts; Endeavour: A Space Trilogy for the NASA Expedition of Dr. Mae C. Jemison, an ambient operetta commemorating the American astronaut’s orbit around Earth; The Call in the Limitless Space, a permanent interactive installation for Wa Na Wari/Seattle based on reclamation of natural and architectural spaces in the city’s Central District; Everyday Until Tomorrow, a conceptual “Library Music” soundtrack for TWA Terminal 5 at JFK airport; Something to (Be)Hold, a large-scale site-specific public sound work produced concurrently with her first career survey by The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery; and Tamalpais Higher, a geophonic reimagining of a seismic event based on a blind thrust fault running through Mount Tamalpais north of the San Francisco Bay.
She has an extended discography of soundwalks, solo and group recording projects (serving as a instrumentalist, bandleader, arranger, improviser, songwriter and sound designer), including her multistylistic live ensemble.
Her writing has been published by Oxford American, Invert/Extant (U.K.), The Mentor that Matters series, The Santa Barbara Literary Journal and in the anthologies, Joy Has a Sound: Black Sonic Visions and Carpenters: An Illustrated Discography.
She holds an Interdisciplinary Master of Fine Arts in Sound and Architecture from Goddard College, and has been awarded residencies and commissions at the ACA Soundscape Field Station at Canaveral National Seashore, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Arctic Circle, Wa Na Wari, InSitu Polyculture Commons, The William T. Davis Nature Conservancy, The Beach Institute Savannah, The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Foundation, 429 Architectural Spaces, Condé Nast Gallery and The Joshua Tree Cultural Preservation Center.
DATES
2024
January 2024
Alterntive Reality Broadcast, NY
4 February 2024
Concert Residency
Rockwood Music Hall, New York, NY
11 February 2024
Concert Residency
Rockwood Music Hall, New York, NY
18 February 2024
Concert Residency
Rockwood Music Hall, New York, NY
28 February 2023
Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place
The Jefferson Market Library, New York, NY
29 February 2023
Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place
The Puffin Foundation, NJ
13 March 2023
Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place
The Jefferson Market Library, New York, NY
2023
2 February 2023
Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place
The Spitsbergen Gallery, Longyarbyen, Svalbard
20-26
March 2023
Fathom
Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL
5 April 2023
(Re)Sounding Visions
Arts 240 Auditorium, California State University San Marcos, CA
Mary Edwards discusses her research and compositions in environmental sound, invisible architecture, the emotive, historic and spatial properties of sound, the intimate immensity of cinematic audio and a score for the transforming Arctic landscape as part of this visiting artist series.
16 April 2023
In Concert
Rockwood Music Hall, New York, NY
25 May 2023
Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place
How to Build a Fire @Open Source Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
27 May 2023
In Concert
Rockwood Music Hall, Stage 3, New York, NY
28 June 2023
Notes Between Sessions (microsode)
Podcast
18 July 2023
World Listening Day
Midwest Society of Acoustic Ecology
In collaboration with The World Listening Project, the Midwest Society of Acoustic Ecology welcomes composer and sound artist Mary Edwards and artist-educator Kristine Diekman to Chicago to meet its members. Hosted by Eric Leonardson and Deirdre Harrison.
30 July 2023
In Concert
Rockwood Music Hall, New York, NY
17-20 August 2023
CAMPBIENT: The 44-Hour Sound Art Residency
Rainbow Falls State Park, Chehalis, WA
17-20 August 2023
The Call in the Limitless Space
Wa Na Wari, Seattle WA
24 September 2023
Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place
Epsilon Spires, Brattlboro, Vemont
17-20 August 2023
The Call in the Limitless Space II
ASAP/14: Arts of Fugitivity, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
1 October 2023
In Concert
Rockwood Music Hall, New York, NY
5 November 2023
In Concert
Rockwood Music Hall, New York, NY
22-25 November 2023
Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place
Beyond Listening: Agency, Art and the Environment, an Interterntonal Symposium on Sonic Ecologies
Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME), Budapest, Hungary
Through 31 December
Something to (Be)Hold
Grimshaw-Gudewicz Gallery, Fall River, MA
Something to (Be)Hold , Mary Edwards' large site-specific installation, encompasses a five-part series of meditative, environmental sound walks surrounding the Grimshaw-Gudewicz gallery in Fall River, MA. The work premiered in 2021 with Edwards' mid-career retrospective survey of environmental compositions. Something to (Be)Hold remains open and accessible to the public until December 31. The gallery invites you to stroll the campus and listen to her work as it is intended – in the landscape.
SELECTED PROJECTS
Something to (Be)Hold
Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place
The Call in the Limitless Space and
The Call in the Limitless Space II, 2023
The Grey Area
In this web feature for Oxford American, Mary Edwards offers a sensory tour of The Grey restaurant's long history meditating on its segregated past through the eyes of her ninety-year-old mother, Jewel Edwards. Read "The Grey Area'" and listen to its accompanying soundscape here.
Four Pageant Motifs for Ida B. Wells
Tamalpais Higher
The Wa(l)king Pattern Revisited
Endeavour: A Space Trilogy
for the NASA Expedition of Dr. Mae C. Jemison
Gospel Number Eight: Tributary
When the Ocean Meets the Sky
per/severance
Epilogue for a Quinn Martin Production
NEW WEBSITE COMING SOON / FOLLOW ON INSTAGRAM
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