Wearable Homes
Sculptures and Photographs | 2006–ongoing
Wearable Homes addresses urgent themes of climate migration, mutual aid, and speculative design through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates sculpture, performance, and photography. This series has been featured in exhibitions focused on survival strategies, environmental justice, and wearable technology. Its anticipatory design—envisioning forms of protection and distancing—gained renewed relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the artist revisited the project through the creation of monastic, minimalist suits.
Project Details
Years: 2002-2008
Locations: Exhibited internationally
Materials: Performance textiles (Cordura, Outlast, Gore-Tex-like fabrics), solar panels, sensors, reclaimed hardware, self-made water filtration devices
"I began making Wearable Homes as a way to imagine how we might live when shelter, clean water, and safety are no longer guaranteed. After spending years living in temporary ecosystems I helped build, I wanted to consider what a single person might carry and depend on. These suits are layered—in material, in metaphor, in critique. They reflect my personal reckoning with consumption and isolation. Over time, they grew into shared structures, spaces for imagining solidarity in movement." - Mary Mattingly
Description
Wearable Homes is a speculative sculptural and photographic series that visualizes survival in a future shaped by climate migration, economic precarity, and technological overreach. Conceived in 2002, the project responds to the absence of social safety nets and envisions life after the privatization of basic needs. Each sculptural suit is both critique and proposition: a dystopian artifact of a world in which humans navigate waterlogged, desertified, or irradiated terrain with only what they can carry on their backs.
The suits are modular and multi-layered, designed for different climates: a subtropic (desert) layer, a water layer, and a subarctic layer. These layers could be worn individually or combined, adapting to changing environmental conditions. Made from performance fabrics including Cordura, Outlast, Solarweave, and Gore-Tex-like materials, the suits incorporate temperature-regulating technology, solar panels, vibration-charged batteries, and embedded sensors that monitor vital signs and environmental conditions.
Each suit includes a built-in water purification device and space to carry emotional, spiritual, or practical items, such as medicines or objects of devotion. In extreme cases, the midsection expands to accommodate a baby, inspired by marsupial pouches. Protective elements such as mesh breastplates, radiation-blocking hoods, and communication sensors are integrated into the suit, while “reachers” and “receivers” on the back simulate the possibility of touch in a future where physical contact is rare.
Initially conceived as individual survival units, the project evolved into a Wearable City—a collective structure wherein multiple suits could connect via universal attachments to form weatherproof domes for temporary community living. In doing so, Wearable Homes shifts from a vision of solitary survival to a speculative architecture of mutual care and adaptation. It merges material ethics, critical design, and social imagination into a deeply personal and political body of work.
