Artist-in-Resident 2022

From February 28 – March 14, 2022, Mary Edwards lived and worked at the Doris Leeper home in Canaveral National Seashore. She used her time to design a site-specific sound art installation welcoming the public to ponder unique listening prompts which contributed to the creation of a published book. This exhibition was on display from March 30 - May 2, 2022, with the final book release (in December) chronicling the experience. Mary's book Conservation/Conversation can be ordered online via this link:Conservation/Conversation by Mary Edwards | Blurb Books

Mary says about this work, "As a composer and sound artist whose objective is to enhance the listener’s spatial-sensory, historical and ecological awareness, I am excited to have been given this remarkable opportunity, and for my encounters at Canaveral National Seashore and it’s biodiverse, sonically enriched terrain. Listening to, and describing sounds are an inherent and integral part of my process of understanding co-existences, and how conservation and conversation are etymologically, if not urgently, interchangeable. During my residency with the ACA Soundscape Field Station, I invite visitors to collaborate and engage in the immersive sound available to them in this distinctive environment. All sounds are habitable, and have the potential to be transformative once you get inside them. They can be simultaneously intimate and immense. What are the parallels between a gentle rainstorm and a NASA rocket launch in the distance? A whisper in your ear and the crashing of ocean waves, or the beating of a drum and your own heartbeat when all else appears silent? What do we know what to listen for, and how do we describe these sounds to others? How does the practice of deeper listening raise our awareness to soundscape ecology, our compassion, or stewardship and healing of each other and the wellness of the environment? These are some of the questions I will bring to the community, by way of our dialogue and posted signage located around the park. Afterwards, I will synthesize the responses to the questions with sounds and music I compose in response to the area, into text and a recording that will cinematically reflect the themes of temporality, impermanence, nostalgia and the natural world that recur throughout my work. Moreover, I hope to honor the collective experiences and the importance of listening to this wild coastal expanse with this creative work."

Mary Edwards is an American composer and sound artist who uses the medium as an environmental or architectural element with the objective to enhance the listener’s spatial-sensory, historical and ecological awareness. Themes of temporality, impermanence, nostalgia, terrestrial/aquatic/airspaces and the natural world recur throughout her immersive installations and compositions. She says, “All sounds are habitable, and have the potential to be transformative once you get inside them. My process is to respond cinematically to their constructional and emotional aspects by locating a narrative and cultivate a soundtrack one may associate with acoustic intimacy. It is an extension of my relationship to the natural and human-made environs, its community, and their histories that reveal themselves in these spaces I explore, each being simultaneously intimate and immense.”

In 2021, The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery produced her first career survey of sound works in conjunction with Something to (Be)Hold, her first large-scale public sound installation. Other projects have been commissioned and/or curated by The Provincetown Museum, The Beach Institute, Tybee Island Marine Science Center, The Joshua Tree Cultural Preservation Center, Indivisible Gallery, 429 Architectural Spaces and The William T. Davis Conservancy. Her most recent essays and writing can be found in Invert/Extant (U.K.), The Mentor that Matters series, and the anthology, Joy Has a Sound: Black Sonic Visions. In 2022, she will participate in The Arctic Circle Residency sailing expedition around Svalbard (the Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole), where she will collect, then convert, glacial geology and ocean data into music and sound. She currently lives between Savannah and New York.