All Night I Hear the Noise of Water Sobbing | Sculpture, Installation
This exhibition grew out of intimate experiences of water: a flood, a particular grief, and eventually dream life. A residency at Materials for the Arts shaped the work's direction — the warehouse of donated objects, their color, texture, and histories of use, opened the practice toward improvisation and toward questions of desire, attachment, and memory.
The sculptures are water systems, or suggestions of them are timekeepers that read time through dripping, seepage, saturation, and slow erosion. The objects are domestic and bodily at once: readable as household things, and also as organs, cavities, parts of fragile systems. The broken body still functions, like the broken ecosystem, patched together and held in continuous repair by the living system itself.
Project Details
- Year: 2026
- Location: Materials for the Arts, Queens, NY
- Media: Sculpture, collage, photography
- Materials: Water, reclaimed vessels and household objects, acrylic paint on textile, water pumps and tubing, ceramic, collage materials.
Exhibition Description + Installation Views
Through a series of sculptural installations made with donated objects from Materials for the Arts, All Night I Hear the Noise of Water Sobbing invites viewers into what Mattingly describes as a large still life with representations of plants, fruit, and animals whose pleasurable surfaces carry traces of damaged ecosystems and extractive systems. Borrowing from the visual language of domestic life, the works recast household objects as organs, cavities, and fragile infrastructure. The broken body still functions, like the broken ecosystem, patched together and held in continuous repair.
Drawing on Vanessa Andreotti's writing in Hospicing Modernity, the exhibition understands still life as a representation of a larger, injured, and also resilient living system. The title comes from Alejandra Pizarnik's poem of the same name, about a deep and agonizing love in which water carries pain. Here, water carries all of us.
"This exhibition grew out of intimate experiences of water: a flood, a particular grief, and eventually my dream life. I thought of this exhibition as a large still life: plants, fruit, animals, pleasurable and decorative objects that carry, beneath the surface, traces of a damaged ecosystem and the extractive systems shaping our daily lives. What happens to water happens to our bodies, and to the bodies of the beings we live alongside. This exhibition is one way of listening to that." — Mattingly
Photographs by Stefan Hagen.