Perri Lynch Howard
Perri Lynch Howard is a multi-disciplinary artist working in painting, drawing, installation, and sound. Her work investigates the passage of light, sound, and signal through landscapes on the front lines of climate change — a phenomenology of place.
Howard is based in Washington state and interested in environments at the forefront of climate change. Self-described as a “sound artist interested in quiet,” Howard has travelled the world recording sounds in the environment both above ground and underwater, investigating ideas around sound and quiet, working to chart and capture sites at the forefront of extreme environmental change. In her practice, Howard asks: What is natural quiet? How does sound effect marine life in the oceans? How do we truly listen to and experience our environment?
Howard creates immersive underwater soundscapes and visualizations from her field recordings that connect people to the life and shape of our oceans and coastal waterways. The multi-sensory nature of her work creates spaces for listening and experiencing water and marine life in a viscerally unique way.
Howards’s art has a global reach through exhibitions and sound installations completed in Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Canada, the Arctic Circle, and in South India as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar. She is a volunteer field recording ambassador with Quiet Parks International, an avid adventurer, and a pilot.
Howard received her BA from The Evergreen State College, BFA from the University of Washington, and MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Honors include a Puffin Foundation Grant, Artist Trust Fellowship, McMillen Fellowship, Seattle City Artist Grant, a Foundation for Contemporary Art grant, and multiple 4Culture Special Project Grants. She has received support from numerous residencies including the Montello Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Centrum Foundation, PLAYA, Willapa Bay AIR, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Arctic Circle Residency Program. Her paintings and drawings are represented by Smith & Vallee Gallery in Edison, WA and the Seattle Art Museum Gallery.
In her upcoming installation Overheard Underwater at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Howard will transform the Center Street Gallery into an underwater vessel with an immersive soundscape using bio-acoustic recordings from the William A. Watkins Collection of Marine Mammal Sound Recordings in the Museum’s collection. Collected over a span of seven decades by oceanographer William A. Watkins with the assistance of William E. Schevill, and others, these recordings consist of more than 60 species of marine mammals in a wide range of geographic areas. She will pair those recordings with her own hydrophone recordings collected in Svalbard in the Arctic Circle and in the bustling New Bedford harbor. Contrasting the recordings in Svalbard with those in New Bedford, Howard will create a space to think about the impacts of anthropogenic marine noise on whales and what quiet means for the marine life living underwater.