conscient podcast

e180 mary edwards - capturing the beauty and terror of reality

Episode Notes

• We're all going to be affected by the same outcome. When I went up to Svalbard (Norway), I went with the intention of also capturing the beauty and the terror of the reality of these changes and how they can be at once fascinating to listen to, but also devastating to the environment.

You’ve just heard an excerpt from composer and environmental sound artist Mary Edwards’ Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place composition, an ode to the transforming Arctic landscape, climate vulnerability, elemental sensuality and Terrestrial Space Analogues. 

Mary kindly shared a compilation mix from this soundscape composition with me to provide an example of her work that you’ll hear throughout this episode. 

Mary holds an Interdisciplinary Master of Fine Arts in Sound and Architecture from Goddard College, and has been awarded residencies and commissions around the world. 

I met Mary for the first time at the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology’s Listening Pasts/Listening Futures Conference in Florida in March 2023 and was immediately struck by the originality of her art and her positive energy, generosity and curiosity. We spoke by Zoom on May 24th, 2024 when we were both recovering from an unseasonable cold snap. 

We talked about her interdisciplinary arts and listening practices that encompass notions of temporality, impermanence, nostalgia and the natural world. For example:

• Listening is an inherent part of what I do. It’s not just creating sound and music, but raising awareness. If we listen more intently to our environment, we can understand the health of our environment.

Welcome to the wonderful and engaging sonic world of Mary Edwards. 

Mary recommended the follow :

• Silent Spring and other writing on the environment and Sea Trilogy by Rachel Carson
• Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives by Jane Brox (note: during our conversation Mary accidentally called her Suzanne Knox)
• The work of composer Sven Libaek see https://theroundtable.bandcamp.com/album/the-music-of-sven-libaek