PODCAST
in Fall 2025, Mary Edwards will be featured on Footnotes, a podcast that takes you on soundwalks. Each episode unfolds as a walk-and-talk session, a journey through sounds, places, and diverse ways of listening. For each episode, Jacek Smolicki invites a different guest—an architect, biologist, artist, activist, or community leader—someone with a unique and inspiring approach to listening. Together, they explore how paying attention to sound shapes, or could shape, our perception of both built and natural environments
Recorded on location, while walking side by side—or remotely, as they amble through different geographies—these conversations explore what it means to engage with the world by listening: to its many voices, actors, and layered histories.
Footnotes is an invitation to slow down, tune in, and reflect on how attentive listening can deepen—or even reconfigure—our relationship with the world. It’s a way of imagining more sustainable, just, and empathetic forms of coexistence in an increasingly complex and fragmented reality.
Produced at Ekoton, a sound-centered design and research studio in Stockholm, Sweden.
EXHIBITION/INSTALLATION
Ten Good Years is an imaginative soundwalk drawing on dendrology, bioacoustics and listening to the inner life of trees. Their narrative gives the illusion of time and space slipping, extending or contracting through its soundscape composition. This project is originally produced for the 2025 CENSE Beyond Listening Walking-with changes (Cross European Network for Sonic Ecologies) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The work will be on exhibition September 23-28, 2025.
“By walking-with and listening to the “cultural turn” toward posthumanism we contribute to a shift in understanding humanity’s place within the world, challenging human exceptionalism and dominance. By walking-with and listening we engage in embodied practices that stimulate awareness of limited planetary resources and humanity’s destructive impact, from climate change to biodiversity loss. Such practices urge us to rethink the relationships with non-human life, technology, and ecosystems, advocating for an ethical shift and interdependent approach, to inspire coexistence for more sustainable futures.”
PUBLICATION
A Composer’s Instrumental Ode to the Arctic Circle
Environmental sound artist Mary Edwards turns field recordings of glacial phenomena in Svalbard into a collaborative musical performance. Read More…
DOCUMENTARY
American Graveyard, a feature-length documentary, will tell the sweeping story of Black history in America—beginning with a single cemetery on Staten Island, NY. The interred in this burial ground—which was destroyed in the 1950s—represent a population of free and formerly enslaved people from New York and New Jersey, and as far away as Virginia and the Carolinas. Through on-camera interviews, rare archival footage and photographs, letters, and courtroom testimonies, American Graveyard will uncover history that has been hidden for centuries. Mary Edwards is among the selected multidisciplinary artists creating their interpretation of Cherry Lane Cemetery for the film and resulting exhibition. Coming 2027.
PUBLICATION
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.
PUBLICATION
The Wa(l)king Pattern Revisited in Joy Has a Sound
Joy Has a Sound: Black Sonic Visions 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.
DOCUMENTARY
Sounds Interesting: The CAMPBIENT Experience
CAMPBIENT: The 44 Hour Sound Art Residency is an annual event that brings together select artists to a Washington State Park for a weekend of conceiving, recording, and realizing a sound art composition. 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. Composer and sound artist Mary Edwards, initially invited as the Special Guest Artist-in-Residence before assuming a new role as producer to CAMPBIENT, contributes her knowledge, insights, and experience to the documentation of Volume 5 of CAMPBIENT, which took place June 6-9, 2024. More info: https://campbient.org/
VIDEO
Everywhere we Are is the Farthest Place commemorates the first World Day for Glaciers, declared by the UN in its resolution A/RES/77/158 along with the International Year of Glaciers 2025, encourage us all to act to preserve the vital role of glaciers in sustaining life on Earth for generations to come.
CONCERT
Performing “The Meltwater Channel” movement from Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place in concert at The Hamptons JazzFest 2025 at The Church at Sag Harbor. Mary Edwards (accompanied by Michael Eaton on soprano sax) gently prepared the Mid-Century Steinway with select accoutrements to emphasize the piano’s innate percussive properties.
PUBLICATION
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.
RESIDENCY
Artist-in-Residence: Mary Edwards at Canaveral National Seashore
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 limited edition published book and recording. This exhibition was on display from March 30 - May 2, 2022, with the final book release, Conservation/Conversation (in December) chronicling the experience. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/artist-in-resident-2022.htm