Mary Mattingly: Equilbrium
Mary Mattingly: Equilibrium
Pace University Art Gallery
September 27-November 1, 2025
Known for her ambitious civic projects that merge art, environmental inquiry, and community engagement, Mary Mattingly reimagines the gallery as a collaborative laboratory — a space for co-learning, foraging, cultivation, and speculative reflection aimed at developing shared solutions. “Since 2001, I’ve lived in New York City, creating sculptural ecosystems that prioritize access to food, shelter, and water,” said Mattingly. “My work often takes the form of participatory initiatives rooted in care, ecological awareness, and collective imagining.”
Equilibrium brings together several ongoing and interconnected bodies of work, including a new site-specific work, Holding Water, and Rooted, a living installation composed of plant species selected for their resilience in flood-prone environments like New York City—particularly those affected by saltwater intrusion. The exhibition also includes Salt Forms, sculptural steel discs that accumulate crystalline salt after being submerged in the city’s brackish waterways. Building on the theme of flooding, Mattingly presents buoy bundles and submerged books from her House and Universe series, evoking themes of knowledge loss, overconsumption, and climate-driven decay.
In addition, the exhibition highlights documentation from Swale, Mattingly’s groundbreaking floating food forest project that challenged food access policies by allowing New Yorkers to freely harvest edible plants from a repurposed barge. The show also presents Night Gardens, a series of photographic collages portraying mythic and adaptive gardens shaped by ecological memory, inviting viewers to reconsider the garden as a space of resilience, disruption, and renewal.
Mattingly is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores ecological relationships through sculptural ecosystems and collage. Her public projects, such as Swale, a floating food forest in New York City’s waterways; Waterpod, a self-sufficient living structure on a barge; and the Flock House Project, a series of mobile habitats, address urgent issues around water, food systems, and climate adaptation. Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Storm King Art Center, the International Center of Photography, the Barbican, Seoul Art Center, and the Palais de Tokyo. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Yale School of Art, A Blade of Grass, and the Anchorage Museum among others. Her work has been featured in Art21, The New York Times, and Le Monde. At the core of Mattingly’s practice is a belief in art as a form of investigation and a tool for imagination.
Equilibrium brings together several ongoing and interconnected bodies of work, including a new site-specific work, Holding Water, and Rooted, a living installation composed of plant species selected for their resilience in flood-prone environments like New York City—particularly those affected by saltwater intrusion. The exhibition also includes Salt Forms, sculptural steel discs that accumulate crystalline salt after being submerged in the city’s brackish waterways. Building on the theme of flooding, Mattingly presents buoy bundles and submerged books from her House and Universe series, evoking themes of knowledge loss, overconsumption, and climate-driven decay.
In addition, the exhibition highlights documentation from Swale, Mattingly’s groundbreaking floating food forest project that challenged food access policies by allowing New Yorkers to freely harvest edible plants from a repurposed barge. The show also presents Night Gardens, a series of photographic collages portraying mythic and adaptive gardens shaped by ecological memory, inviting viewers to reconsider the garden as a space of resilience, disruption, and renewal.
Mattingly is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores ecological relationships through sculptural ecosystems and collage. Her public projects, such as Swale, a floating food forest in New York City’s waterways; Waterpod, a self-sufficient living structure on a barge; and the Flock House Project, a series of mobile habitats, address urgent issues around water, food systems, and climate adaptation. Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Storm King Art Center, the International Center of Photography, the Barbican, Seoul Art Center, and the Palais de Tokyo. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Yale School of Art, A Blade of Grass, and the Anchorage Museum among others. Her work has been featured in Art21, The New York Times, and Le Monde. At the core of Mattingly’s practice is a belief in art as a form of investigation and a tool for imagination.
Installation images by Adam Reich
