(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Q&A: How a Rural Artist Uses Sound to Tell Climate Stories [1]

['Ilana Newman', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']

Date: 2024-10-04

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

Perri Lynch Howard is an artist based in rural Washington who uses audio, sculpture, drawing, and painting to tell narratives of climate change and quiet places. One of her current projects involves recording underwater in the Arctic to bring awareness to noise in the ocean. Her visual art is often an interpretation of sound in physical form.

Enjoy our conversation about connection to place, how noise affects health, and being a full-time artist in a rural community.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ilana Newman, The Daily Yonder: Can you start by just telling me a little bit about yourself and the projects that you’re currently working on?

Perri Lynch Howard: My name is Perri Lynch Howard and I’m an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound. I live in this tiny hamlet of Twisp, Washington in the Methow Valley where my studio is located. But my work really resonates globally. I’ve had the great good fortune to be a field recording ambassador with Quiet Parks International and also participate in residencies and field recording opportunities all over the place. So the sound recording part of my creative practice is the essence of all of it for me.

I consider the paintings and drawings that I make to be like a material trace of the sounds that I hear in the natural world to encourage people to try to visualize the unseen and help people to become better listeners and use the power of listening to protect the landscapes that they hold dear and to establish sort of a deeper sense of place through listening to the landscape.

Perri Lynch Howard embarks on a field recording expedition as part of the Soundscape Field Station Residency at Canaveral National Seashore, New Smyrna Beach, FL. (Photo by Patrick Connolly)

DY: Would you say that you process things auditorily or visually or is it a combination?

PLH: That is such a great question. I think the best way to explain is this Audubon quote, which is, “if the bird and the book disagree, believe the bird.” Listening is how I engage with the landscape. I will always go back to what I’ve heard to process things. A lot of anthropogenic sound is on the rise.

I continually seek out quiet places where our human presence isn’t so present so that I can connect with the essence of place through sound. I’d say I primarily process things orally. But without a visual manifestation, I kind of feel like I’m all alone. When I begin to process what I’m hearing and what I’m experiencing visually through paintings and sculptures and installations, I feel like I can bring everybody else with me and that’s deeply satisfying.

DY: That’s so beautiful. The way that you connect sound and visuals is so unique. I’m curious about your brand, however you’d refer to it. Where does Velocity Made Good come from?

PLH: That’s another great question. I grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, which is this little tiny town about 20 miles north of Boston. It’s a big epicenter for sailing. I grew up on the saltwater. I spent a lot of time sailing and a lot of time sailboat racing. My interest in sailing and sailboat racing and thereby navigation continued through my growing up and college and as a young adult. “Velocity made good” is a term from sailing. VMG. Velocity is speed, like how fast you’re going, right? Velocity made good is how much speed you have in the direction that you actually want to go. When you’re sailing a sailboat, you can’t just point upwind and go. You have to tack and jive and work with the wind. You can’t go straight at the wind. So velocity made good is how much of your speed is taking you where you want to go.

And for me, that’s deeply metaphoric for the artistic creative process. There is so much nonlinear return in the arts and I will work so hard to go in one direction only to have something wonderful happen from someplace else. That is, for me, what velocity made good is all about. High VMG means a lot of my energy and a lot of my speed is going where I wanna go. Low VMG means I’m sort of all over the place, not really getting anywhere. And I think the creative process has to have a healthy mix of both to be satisfying and successful. A piece from Perri Lynch Howard’s “Frequencies” series, titled Frequencies: Slipping Through, exploring the passage of light, sound, and signal through vulnerable landscapes. (Photo provided by Perri Lynch Howard)

DY: Yeah, sometimes you’re not going where you think you want to go, but eventually, you get somewhere better.

PLH: Exactly. Yeah.

DY: You live in rural north central Washington. How do you see your work intersecting with where you live?

PLH: I live where I live because it’s very quiet here. Okanagan County up here in North Central Washington is almost entirely underneath restricted airspace. It’s a military training zone, so sometimes we have super loud low military aircraft in the area, but infrequently. That means that the rest of the time, there is very little aircraft noise over the areas where I live.

There’s also abundant access to public land and natural resources. So because of the proximity to the natural world and then these restrictions on aviation noise, it creates a beautiful inspiring landscape that I am learning from all the time. I feel the change of the seasons, the way they’re marked by the birdsong coming on or the birdsong quieting down. I can hear the Methow River from my home. I can’t see it, but I can hear it. And I’m sensitive to the water levels there and how fast the river’s running, how much snow is melting and what’s going on in that incredibly important aquifer. Those are some of the ways that my sound and listening practices inform where I live.

I also am starting to offer sound walks here. I’m starting to offer opportunities for the community to join together in silence and walk single file through these landscapes that we all know so well but maybe have never listened very closely to. And that’s been a very enriching way to share the space with others.

DY: Wow, that’s so special. A new form of art. Community art. Your work is so deeply grounded in place. What are some of the ways that you get to know a place and connect with it when you’re first meeting it?

PLH: Yeah, my work is really connected to place. And sometimes for me, that’s about exercising my own mobility, not necessarily just sitting still. So I’m really connected to the place where I live, but also find incredible creative stimulation by exploring new landscapes. Some of the ways that I connect with place upon arrival is really taking note of what I notice the minute I arrive. I feel that’s the moment we are most open to the world around us and we see the most in just those first few minutes where your brain is doing a fight or flight sort of thing like, is it safe? Is it safe here? If you feel like you’re safe, it’s like look at this. Look at that. Listen to this. Check that out, you know.

I really like to explore a sense of place through exercising my own mobility by moving through that landscape. Whether it’s simply walking or trail running or kayaking or paddle boarding. Paddle boarding is one of my very favorite ways to meet a new place because you have the opportunity to look around but also be moved by the water. That 24-hour period is so important. At night natural places really come alive.

The other place they really come alive are out on the edges. So if I end up in a new landscape and I’m going to do some field recording and some drawing, I typically go to the edges first, because edges are these places of friction and growth and mixing and mingling of one ecosystem with another. An ecotone is formed at these edges where one landscape interacts with another, where the trees meet the prairie, where the beach meets the sea. Those ecotones are incredibly rich in terms of apprehending a sense of your new surroundings.

Perri Lynch Howard embarks on a field recording expedition as part of the Soundscape Field Station Residency at Canaveral National Seashore, New Smyrna Beach, FL. (Photo by Patrick Connolly)

DY: That’s so interesting. So much about sound that you just don’t think about. Which brings me to my next question. I know you think a lot about sound and sound pollution and you also have a background as a pilot. What are some things that the average person doesn’t understand or know about sound and how it affects us and why is it so important to pay attention to?

PLH: That’s such a great question. I’m so glad you asked it. Yes, I have my pilot’s license. So I understand airspace and how airspace is organized. I can look at a chart, a sectional chart that we use in aviation, and I can tell you how loud it’s going to be just by looking at the map. Like, wow, there’s 20 flight training schools and 100 square miles. That’s going to be loud. That’s not a place that I’m going to be super attracted to, at least for that reason. I’ve done some work in Florida, Canaveral National Seashore, helping that community to understand their airspace. Because down there, there’s this rocket launch site that shares the same breath with like a pristine lagoon ecosystem that’s a [part of the] national park. So what’s going on there?

There’s all kinds of sounds that are combining and interrupting each other, often to the detriment of the natural world and to the detriment of communities. Down in Canaveral, one of the things I learned from the community is that unless someone is shouting in your face, we’re generally unaware of how sounds, noises, and interruptions raise our cortisol level, right? Once our cortisol level gets raised, that’s when stress begins. And that’s not necessarily caused by loud sounds, but it’s caused by the onset of sound, and then silencing.

What’s interesting is the language we use in the sound world around those two states. When a sound begins, it’s called the attack, and as a sound ends, it’s called the decay. So attack and decay are two really important words for sound, but they also really help people to understand what’s happening if like a car is accelerating right near you or a plane is passing overhead. How fast that sound is on the attack and how fast or slow it decays has an effect on our nervous system. A lot of people, when they want to study sound or they want to file a complaint with our local authorities, a noise complaint, they focus on decibel levels, how loud something is. But 70 decibels is like an evening chorus in the Amazon, but it’s also a vacuum cleaner. Decibels don’t mean a whole lot. What matters is what kinds of sounds and how frequently are sounds arriving and departing from your experience of place. And once people start to pay attention to that, the next set of moves towards preserving quiet in communities really changes. People stop monitoring decibel levels obsessively and instead start to pay much more attention to it’s the traffic on the bridge or it’s that stoplight or it’s cars drag racing each other at night.

The conversation changes when people are aware of how quickly or slowly sound is arriving or leaving their experience. That’s something that I always encourage communities to pay attention to when they begin to want to protect quiet in their area.

DY: So what are some of those first steps, particularly for rural communities who want to protect their quiet, especially because you often find more quiet in rural communities, but then there’s still often industry or these really loud sounds that kind of come in and out, disturbing that deep quiet. What are some steps to protect that?

PLH: There are two ways to go about it. You can go about it spatially, you can say, this is a quiet zone. This is a no noise zone. Or you can work with it temporally, like during these hours, these sounds can’t happen. One of the big problems is that the world wakes up at the same time. We wake up when the birds wake up, more or less. And so one of the big things we can do to protect natural quiet and give wildlife a break is just like, man, if we just slept till 10 a.m. or we just hung out at home until 10 a.m., we would be allowing the full dawn chorus to happen. We’d be allowing all of the deer with their fawns to move around and do their morning browse without interruption.

So one thing we can do is think about how we’re activating the landscape and when that’s happening and see if we can control this. Controlling the speed of automobiles also really helps. If you have a 65mph zone, can it be brought down to a 35mph zone without really impacting people? Usually not, but maybe. If cars aren’t revving as high or moving as fast, the attack and decay of sound is a lot less. So controlling how much noise there is when, and also how much noise there is where, are two really important steps that we can take. And once you start to protect quiet in an ecosystem or in a rural landscape, you realize quickly that you’re protecting everything. The animals flourish in that space of quiet. We flourish in that space of quiet. We even attract other people. Wellness is a big deal, right? Health and wellness and sound is a big deal right now, so people are traveling to quiet places.

A piece from Perri Lynch Howard’s “Frequencies” series, titled Frequencies: The Dream Before. Lynch Howard calls the series a “a phenomenology of place”. (Photo provided by Perri Lynch Howard)

DY: Yeah, that makes sense. Switching topics, we talked about this a little bit already, but what are some of the challenges and beautiful pieces of being an artist in a rural community? A lot of artists, I think, feel like they need to be in a city to have their work seen. How do you combat that?

PLH: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Being an artist in a rural area, it requires a lot more outreach than being in the city. I had a studio in Seattle for 20 plus years, though I never really felt like much of a city person. I moved from a small town and I live in a really small town now. While I was in Seattle, I totally took for granted how often I was running across other artists and just having these casual conversations about our practice. Also, my work was way more visible to galleries and museums and places that could exhibit the work. I’ve lived rural now for eight years, almost nine. And I’ve had to become a bit of an outreach machine. I used to go on artist residencies to get away from people when I lived in the city. Now I go on artist residencies to meet people. So a lot of my travels, I try to make sure that I’m also not just having a rich creative experience for myself, but also bringing my work forward in a way that others can experience it in different communities. And that, for me, was a big stretch.

I would much rather paint a painting and go hide behind a tree, and let the work speak for itself. But the rewards have been so great because it’s not just about being in like a small community with artists. I truly feel now like I’m connected to a global community of artists and their work inspires me on every level all the time. I wish there were more opportunities to be face-to-face in this way across great distances, but you know, especially with online platforms and things like that, it’s not too difficult to stay connected to other artists in other places and have those really important conversations.

DY: Yeah, that kind of transitions me perfectly to my last question, which is what is inspiring you right now?

PLH: Right now, I’m really inspired by the Arctic. And in particular Arctic water and quiet in Arctic waters and protecting quiet in Arctic waters. I’ve seen the Arctic talked about lately — people call it the Arctic accelerator — things are changing in the Arctic four times faster due to climate change than the rest of the world. And that’s a paint-with-broad-strokes kind of statement. But what I have noticed when I’ve been up in the Arctic Circle is that it all shows up on the edges. Those edges are changing fast due to glacier melt, and due to ocean level rise. I’m really inspired by areas of quiet in the Arctic. I’ve had the great good fortune to spend a number of weeks up there recording quiet water and quiet places. And we’ll have the opportunity to present that work at the New Bedford Whaling Museum next year. Through that exhibition, I hope to raise awareness about how important it is to preserve quiet in our oceans. Unless people hear the soundscapes below the surface of the water, they’ll never know.

The way a ship sounds when it’s going through the water, it sounds like someone is cutting your hair with a hedge trimmer. It is an incredibly loud and incredibly aggressive sound. On the other hand, quiet water in the Arctic is filled with these meltwater channels of water flowing through water that are absolutely beautiful. I’m really excited about capturing those sounds, working with them visually, and sharing them with the rest of the world to the greater good of the environment in the North and therefore the rest of the planet.

DY: Wow, yeah, I’m so excited to see everything that you have created around that. Is there anything else that I didn’t ask that you want people to know or anything else you’d like to share?

PLH: Thank you. I guess if folks want to get more involved with protecting quiet, we can add some links to Quiet Parks International. I would love readers to subscribe to my newsletter if they want to receive that. It only comes out about four times a year, but it’s always focused on a lot of the issues that we talked about today. A lot of times when people start to learn about quiet, they want to take action right away. And I want to provide some ways for people to do so if they want to.

DY: Where else can people find your work?

PLH: The visual work is represented by the Seattle Art Museum Gallery. Otherwise at my website, and on Instagram @Velocity Made Good.

This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. Join my email list By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time. Processing… Success! You're on the list. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.

Related

Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://dailyyonder.com/qa-how-a-rural-artist-uses-sound-to-tell-climate-stories/2024/10/04/

Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.