Mary Edwards

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.

Her soundscape composition, 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 multi-stylistic 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.