Meet the Twisp artist listening to the space between sounds

When sound artist and painter Perri Lynch Howard first heard of the Methow Valley, she wasn’t exactly keen on it. 

As an outdoorsy 16-year-old growing up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, she had signed up for Outward Bound, the national wilderness expedition program. She was desperately hoping to be placed in Colorado (“big mountains, snow, sunshine,” she envisioned), but her assignment instead was in the Methow Valley, in the eastern foothills of the North Cascade Mountains.

“I remember crying at the kitchen table, saying, ‘They’re sending me to Mazama, where’s that??’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna go.’” 

But she went, and discovered a whole new landscape to fall in love with (big mountains, sunshine, rivers). And toward the end of the course, something remarkable happened. Howard was on a seven-mile run down Twisp River Road — her final challenge — when she had a sudden, powerful thought: “How can I live here and be an artist?”

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It took a few decades, but she figured it out. Howard only applied to West Coast colleges, and ended up going to Evergreen. She intended to study painting there, but that changed when she had her first critique with teaching artist Joe Feddersen. “He told me that I paint like a printmaker, so I began studying printmaking with him,” she says. After working in prints for many years, she eventually returned to painting but says, “Joe set me on the path that most closely resembles my work today.”

At first glance, Howard’s work looks like paintings of striking mountains reflected in bodies of water. These organic forms appear to be mapped and measured by mysterious linear equations — as the peaks and soft undulations move horizontally across the plane, radial lines and grids pull the viewer’s eye into the background. 

But these images aren’t mountains. They’re sound waves, which Howard painstakingly captures with a big boom microphone during various excursions into the wilderness. 

Howard remembers being attuned to sound even in her youth, relishing the crunch of sticks underfoot, the wind in sailboat riggings, the reverb inside a church. On the West Coast, she became a birder, looking and listening closely in her spare time. But it wasn’t until grad school that she experienced what she calls a “radical shift” in how she listened to her surroundings.

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After Evergreen, Howard earned a BFA at the University of Washington, and followed that with an MFA at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. While pursuing printmaking there, she also minored in architecture, with an emphasis on “sound as a spatial force.” 

Meanwhile, she kept up with birding, and in the dense forests of Michigan had her first encounter with birders who identify species by sound rather than sight. “They hardly used their binoculars at all because the trees were so leafed out, they couldn’t see the birds. The deciduous forest is so different from the West Coast,” she notes.

“It opened a door for me in my awareness,” Howard says. “This new sensibility forever changed the way I perceive my surroundings, and the way I create my art.” 

Now Howard travels to vulnerable ecosystems, from the Arctic Circle to Oregon, capturing what they sound like before these places are forever altered by climate change and human encroachment. She listens for a cacophony of animals — birdsong, frog chorus, goose honks and coyote howls — in addition to the soft shushing of wind through trees and the chuckling of rivers across rocks. What intrigues her most is the space between these sounds, the character and quality of the silence.

After recording the natural soundscape, Howard heads back into the studio and reviews the audio as translated into an oscillogram and spectrogram. These graphs give her a visual sense of the patterns — whether staccato bursts or low buzzes. She says what you hope to see is all manner of markings, versus a block of white noise. The latter signals the sound of human intrusion. 

Next she uses a sketchbook to map out the sounds across four-minute increments, adding insights from her emotional experience of each place. She also notes the color palette of the location, whether icy blues, mustard yellows or muddy greens. While these landscapes aren’t literal, each element — sound, color, feeling — is incorporated into the final image.

Howard listens to the recordings while painting, starting with a squeegee to place the initial wave forms, then slowly building up (and removing) layers of paint as she maps out and adds depth to the soundscape. “I want to immerse my listener in the world that I inhabit,” she explains. 

She now inhabits a world she first encountered as a high school student. After grad school, Howard returned to Seattle, where she says her studio spaces became both smaller and more expensive over the years. About a decade ago, she decided it was time to move east of the mountains. Seeking a quieter, more affordable place to live, she and her husband landed just outside of Twisp, not far from the road where she had her teenage epiphany.

“I felt so much relief, right away, upon arrival,” she says. “It’s amazing to come full-circle.” With more space to create and less human racket to contend with, Howard wants to share her sense of place and way of listening — an approach she calls “poetic and heart-based… a story, not a statistic.”