Special Episode: The Call in the Limitless Space II

This bonus episode features a sound art piece by Mary Edwards for the 2023 ASAP/14 conference in Seattle and Bothell, Washington.

About the sound piece: The Call in the Limitless Space comprises a collection of short, recorded reflections from people in the Wa Na Wari community who reflect on themes of spatial reclamation, Black Joy and belonging, specifically to their ancestral lineage or connection to Seattle's Historic Central District. 

Composer and sound artist Mary Edwards designed a soundscape with the incorporated recordings to be digitally ported into a vintage telephone booth which serves as a permanent, interactive installation for Wa Na Wari. The stand-alone soundscape is contributed for listening components of the ASAP/14: Arts of Fugitivity Conference.

As part of her process, Edwards facilitated a Soundwalk in the Historic Central District where participants engaged in what was, at once, an ecological practice, a method of inquiry, a call to action, and a guided meditation on reclaiming natural and architectural spaces through resonant humming and a call-and-response of place-naming as an invocation, helping to give a voice and harmonic convergence to something that is already there, yet calls for “unearthing.” She successively conducted a workshop where participants’ sense of recollection and restoration were synthesized into The Call in the Limitless Space II, a text score drawn from this deep, active listening.

About the artist:

Mary Edwards is a composer and sound artist whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses installation, cinematic audio and environmental design. She is interested in the invisible architecture and the emotive, historic and spatial properties of sound. In 2021, The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery produced her first career survey concurring with Something to (Be)Hold, her first large-scale public sound installation. As the 2022 Artist-in-Residence for the ACA Soundscape Field Station, she was living and working in Canaveral National Seashore, audio recording, and researching for her book and interactive project, Conservation/Conversation as part of Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her other residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, The Beach Institute Savannah, The William T. Davis Nature Conservancy, Wa Na Wari, Epsilon Spires and The Arctic Circle Residency. In 2023, her sound installation Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place, premiered at The Spitsbergen Artists Center in Svalbard. Her most recent works include Fathom a site-intended sound installation for the Atlantic Center for the Arts, launched during the 2023 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) Conference, Listening Pasts/Listening Futures, 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. 

Her extended discography includes Endeavour: A Space Trilogy for the NASA Expedition of Dr. Mae C. Jemison, and Everyday Until Tomorrow, a conceptual soundtrack for TWA Terminal 5 at JFK airport. 

Her writing has been published by Oxford American, Invert/Extant (U.K.), The Mentor that Matters series, The Santa Barbara Literary Journal and the anthology, Joy Has a Sound: Black Sonic Visions. 

Episode Transcript and Score:

https://simpsoncenter.org/podcasts/bonus-episode-call-limitless-space-ii-mary-edwards-asap14

Mary Edwards’ website

http://maryedwardsmusic.com/

Wa Na Wari homepage

https://www.wanawari.org/

ASAP14 Conference linktree