MARY EDWARDS: Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place
Sun, Jul 28
|Epsilon Spires
An interactive live score combining cinematic audio and ambient field recordings gathered in the Arctic, composer and sound artist Mary Edwards creates a meditative "ode rather than an elegy" to the connectivity and sensuality of the transforming Arctic landscape and Space Analogues.
Time & Location
Jul 28, 2024, 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM
Epsilon Spires, 190 Main St, Brattleboro, VT 05301, USA
About the event
Epsilon Spires is proud to present Mary Edwards' EVERYWHERE IS THE FARTHEST PLACE in collaboration with In Situ Polyculture Commons.
MARY EDWARDS: Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place, an iterative soundscape composition, combines an electroacoustic performance with field recordings of glacial geologic activity and oceanographic data Mary Edwards gathered while on an art and science sailing expedition on a research vessel above the 78th parallel in Svalbard. This ode rather than an elegy to the transforming Arctic based on eyewitness accounts of natural events—iceberg torrents, calving glaciers, whale song and converging subterranean rivers—is sonically recreated as a score with intention of “decentralizing the centered and un-othering the others.” It also pays homage to our water origins and the isolation and wonder of Terrestrial Analogue sites—places on Earth with assumed past or present geological, environmental or biological conditions of a celestial body such as the Moon or Mars—where NASA sends their astronauts to train for space exploration such as the Arctic desert.
Mary Edwards is a composer, environmental sound artist and writer whose practice encompasses installation, scoring and performance. Themes of temporality, impermanence, nostalgia and the natural world 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 transformative once you get inside them, as they are simultaneously intimate and immense.
She was the 2022 Artist-in-Resident for The ACA Soundscape Field Station at Canaveral National Seashore, where she designed Conservation/Conversation, a site-specific sound art installation. Her recent projects include Fathom, a site-related soundscape launched at The Atlantic Center for the Arts during the 2023 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) Conference: Listening Pasts/Listening Futures; Endeavour: A Space Trilogy for the NASA Expedition of American Astronaut Dr. Mae C. Jemison for the Beach Institute in Savannah; The Call in the Limitless Space, a permanent interactive installation for Wa Na Wari Art Gallery based on reclamation of natural and architectural spaces in Seattle'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 public sound work on the grounds of The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery, produced 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 has an extended discography of solo and collaborative works, and her writings have been published by Oxford American, Invert/Extant U.K. and The 3rd Thing Press. She holds an Interdisciplinary MFA in Sound and Architecture from Goddard College and has been awarded residencies and commissions around the world including The Arctic Circle, ACA Soundscape Field Station at Canaveral National Seashore and Headlands Center for the Arts.