Mary Edwards is a composer and environmental sound artist whose practice encompasses installations, film scores and performance. Themes of temporality, impermanence, nostalgia and the natural world recur throughout her work. She is å 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 recent projects include Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place, an ode rather than elegy to the transforming Arctic landscape. It comprises a composition and ambient field recordings she gathered from landings around Svalbard, Norway while on a sailing expedition on a research vessel above the 78th parallel. It documents the sound properties of glacial geology and oceanographic data, intended to provide access for all through sonification by “de-centering the centered and un-othering the others”; 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; Everyday Until Tomorrow, a conceptual “Library Music” soundtrack for TWA Terminal 5 at JFK airport; Something to (Be)Hold, a permanent large-scale public sound work produced by The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery concurrently with her first career survey; 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 holds an Interdisciplinary MFA in Sound and Architecture from Goddard College and has been awarded residencies at the ACA Soundscape Field Station at Canaveral National Seashore, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Arctic Circle, The William T. Davis Nature Conservancy and InSitu. Her commissions include works for Invert/Extant, The Beach Institute Savannah, The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Foundation, 429 Architectural Spaces, Condé Nast Gallery and The Joshua Tree Cultural Preservation Center.
