From Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place, performed live at Epsilon Spires, Brattleboro VT, July 2024. Photo: Perri Lynch Howard
Mary Edwards: Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place
October 16, November 13 & December 11
Jefferson Market Library / New York Public Library
All Performances at 6pm. Free and Open to the Public.
Documentary
Sounds Interesting: The CAMPBIENT Experience
CAMPBIENT: The 44 Hour Sound Art Residency is annual event that brings together dozens of artists to a Washington State Park for a weekend of conceiving, recording, and realizing a sound art composition. The residency includes sound-related workshops, creative activities, and a start-to-finish audio production process, the results of which are pressed on vinyl records and distributed digitally. Participating artists camp out, share meals, and collaborate in field recording, sound-making, and creative play. CAMPBIENT is held in a new state park every year, and all audio production and activities are off-grid and battery-powered. By utilizing state parks rather than private land, the residency underscores an awareness of the commons and an obligation for its stewardship. Public spaces that straddle the natural and built environment are rich with questions of social equity and accessibility, environmental justice and sustainability, as well as those of artistic process, critical analysis, and aesthetics. It is these questions that are explored sonically and dialogically throughout the residency. Currently in a Producer role, composer and sound artist Mary Edwards was invited in 2023 as Special Guest Artist-in-Residence to CAMPBIENT to contribute her knowledge, insights, and experience. Participation is open to any interested individuals – not just sound artists, but artists of any discipline, as well as musicians, conceptual thinkers, or anyone who wants to explore the practice and theory of collaboratively producing sound-based artwork in a natural environment. The video presentation is documentation of Volume 5 of CAMPBIENT, which took place June 6-9, 2024. More info: https://campbient.org/
Publication Feature
Polarlit Magazine
Polarlit is a literary magazine founded in 2023 in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. At 78° latitude, it is the northernmost literary magazine in the world. Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place is included in the premiere issue that includes all literary forms and in all languages by anyone who has been touched by this unique place in the Arctic Circle.
Publication Feature
The Grey Area in Oxford American
“I expect Mama Jewel to regale me with stories of how she enjoyed a tea from a Corning Centura Pyroceram cup, or perhaps an Orange Crush soda pop in one of those beveled glass bottles that are now collector's items. Instead, I learn that before this evening, my mother never saw the interior of the Jim Crow-era Greyhound bus station until it was converted into a dining establishment seventy years later. “
Read and listen here to The Grey Area essay and audio by Mary Edwards.
Work in Progress
Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place
A soundtrack/score for the transforming Arctic landscape.
Interview
Conscient Podcast
Conscient is a podcast that deeply explores conversations about the ecological crisis with brilliant, passionate, and visionary artists and cultural workers on the theme of 'preparing for the end of the world as we know it and creating the conditions for other possible worlds to emerge. Mary Edwards talks with host Claude Schryer about her Arctic soundscape composition, Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place.
Interview
Canvas Rebel (June 2024)
Interview
A Touch of Grace Podcast
On A Touch of Grace, Mary Edwards joins Glenn Grace to discuss Composing environmental sound.
Books
Joy Has a Sound: Black Sonic Visions
The Wa(l)king Pattern Revisited included in the Joy Has a Sound anthology of Black art, poetry, prose, scores, scripts and silences, is a poetic adaptation of a soundscape, The Wa(l)king Pattern, also written as an ode to Mary’s mother, Jewel Edwards. During her youth in the 1940s American South—in a bold quest to pursue her education in the face of the Jim Crow Laws—she cultivated an environmental stewardship and deep listening practice during her resolute 4am daily walk part of the way to school as she navigated the natural world.
Joy Has a Sound is a poly-vocal, visually stunning answer to the question, What are the sounds of community and how they are handed down? A home for Black art and culture in Seattle’s Central District, with this anthology The 3rd Thing and Wa Na Wari make a home for the essays, poetry, scores, scripts and silences of the Black poets, musicians, artists and scholars assembled by editors Rachel Kessler and Elisheba Johnson to wonder about the time-traveling, place-making power of sound. It includes “The Wa(l)king Pattern Revisited," by Mary Edwards, a poetic adaptation of a soundscape written as a "living history" ode to her mother, Jewel Edwards. During her youth in the 1940s American South—in a bold quest to pursue her education in the face of the Jim Crow Laws—she cultivated an environmental stewardship and deep listening practice during her resolute 4am daily walk part of the way to school as she navigated the natural world.
From Visualizing Sound: Environmental Sonic Sculptures
Upcoming Dates
DEC 11 THE JEFFERSON MARKET LIBRARY | NYPL
JAN 22 THE JEFFERSON MARKET LIBRARY | NYPL
FEB 14 HAMPTONS JAZZ FEST / THE CHURCH, SAG HARBOR, NY
FEB 26 THE JEFFERSON MARKET LIBRARY | NYPL
MAR 19 THE JEFFERSON MARKET LIBRARY | NYPL