Edie Skeard

Just in Time: Composition of Noticing

May – June 2025

Location

Victoria

Edie Skeard (they/them) is a multimedia artist, flutist, and composer working primarily with light, sound, sculpture, & drawing in an installation context. They are from Treaty 6 in Saskatchewan and are currently based on unceded lək̓ʷəŋən traditional territory, known as Victoria, BC. They studied at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, receiving a BAhons in Philosophy focusing on ethics and a BFA in Visual Art working within sculptural printmaking. They are currently an MFA candidate at the University of Victoria in the department of Visual Arts.

A composite image blending Edie's sound-recording equipment and them working at a laptop in the background.

Edie is an installation/multimedia artist working within sculpture, sound, and drawing. Their work focuses on building generative spaces through the intersection of light, sound, people, duration, and tactility.

They're interested in collecting and collaging field recordings and improvisational sound, how sound creates or erases spatial boundaries, using found materials, tenderly noticing their environment, ontological questions within making, sound as touch and future archive, and the weaving together of sensory mediums.

This project originally aimed to consider new kinds of materials and their potential within Edie's practice. What occurred was a collaborative and playful engagement in noticing and sound making through materials.

Edie with a large metal sculpture they created. Viewers can create a reverberant sound composition via body conductivity.

Edie interacting with hcma staff. They all sit at a table together along with the sculpture.

Together we explored daydreaming as a way of accessing non-time or non-linear time. In particular, Edie thought through time as process, and physical spaces as durations.

The residency included five weeks of sound exploration through materials found in the architectural material library—thinking through conductivity, sound potential, and the body. This was followed by two days of reflection through sketching, and the creation of a sound meditation painting.

Staff were encouraged to engage with the interactive sound installations which changed every week. These installations were touch-responsive and explored body conductivity as a generative sound maker. Using materials from hcma's material library was a way to rethink common materials like steel or aluminum cladding as potential points of public interaction.

Close crop of Edie interacting with their equipment. Their hand is touching a circuit board with green, yellow, red, and white wires strewn about.

Edie's final day prompted staff to engage with a sculpture that allowed two viewers to create a reverberant sound composition with each other.

The final piece of the residency is the Composition of Noticing. Staff sent in sound clips from their lives that were granulated and processed into an interwoven experimental composition.

What is the material relationship between time and the body, and how can we access meaningful and necessary spaces of rest and daydreaming? It sees moving outside of a linear time space as something generative and necessary—positioning play through sound as a means to suspend time.