House and Universe
Photographic Collage Series and Performative Sculptures | 2012–2016
Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, House and Universe is an allegorical series of photographs and sculptural performances that explores material accumulation, supply chains, and personal memory through the lens of mobility and weight. Initiated in 2013, the series features large bundled sculptures (comprised of Mattingly’s own possessions) dragged, floated, and staged in urban and industrial landscapes. These “human-made boulders,” wrapped tightly in twine, are photographed and performed as slow-moving obstructions across iconic trade routes, ports, and bridges.
The work foregrounds consumption and infrastructure as intertwined systems: what we accumulate and discard becomes part of a shared landscape, both physical and psychological. The resulting photographic collages present these actions as speculative monuments (part documentary, part poetic proposal) gesturing toward cycles of extraction, circulation, and disposal.
Project Details
- Years: 2012–2016
- Medium: Photographic collages, sculptures, and performance
- Bundled Objects: Personal belongings including books, electronics, textiles, tools, and furniture
- Exhibited at: Robert Mann Gallery (NYC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), International exhibitions
- Associated Project: Own it.us, an online library cataloging each bundled item and its origin story
“I’ve spent years living in and with ecosystems and shelters I’ve co-built, some of which appear in House and Universe. Those experiences asked me to reconsider my surroundings and to imagine how collections of personal belongings could become monuments to consumption. As a resident of New York City, I contribute to a collective monument: the landfill. In absurd performances, I pulled bundled sculptures of my own possessions through the city to emphasize the literal and symbolic weight of these objects. Their wrappings are inextricably intertwined, like the cycles of production themselves. Through chains of formal and informal exchange, an object is mined, made, distributed, purchased, exchanged, discarded, and then becomes something else. The photographs echo that complexity: they are cobbled together from disparate times and places. Like time capsules, they function as both obstructions and proposals, blocking, interfering, and reframing how we encounter the everyday.” - Mattingly
Description
In House and Universe, Mary Mattingly turns her own accumulated possessions into monumental, bundled sculptures that she drags, floats, and stages in environments shaped by commerce and extraction. Each photograph documents a performance of moving these “man-made boulders” through symbolic sites—bridges, shipyards, ports, and landfills—emphasizing the weight of her personal consumption within global material systems. The bundled objects, sourced from her daily life, become physical metaphors for the formal and informal supply chains that connected her to planetary consequence. Mattingly treats the act of bundling as both monument and obstruction. Her collages mirror the sculptures they depict: layered, fractured, and unresolved, evoking the temporal and spatial disjunctions embedded in material life. By situating her body and belongings within landscapes of trade and waste, Mattingly proposes a deeply personal critique of ecological entanglement, consumption, and the desire to find new forms of living within a system that insists on accumulation.
Selected Works
The Island is the Origin, 2013
Verse and Universe, 2013
Jute Bales, 2012
Pull, 2013
Jute Transport, 2012
The Port, 2012
Terrene, 2013
For a Week Without Speaking, 2013
Cube 3, 2013
Life of Objects, 2013
Flock, 2013
Floating a Boulder, 2012
Filling Double Negative (Landfill), 2013
Ruin in Reverse (Landfill), 2013
Pull (Shipyard), 2013
Critical Perspective
“Mattingly’s performance mirrors obstinate infrastructure—using man-made boulders of personal objects to symbolically obstruct the flow of global goods.”
—Heather Davis
Daily Bundle Sculptures
Studio-Based Sculptural Ritual | 2013–Ongoing
Project Overview
Daily Bundle Sculptures began as a personal practice and evolved into a material investigation into the everyday monumentality of waste. In the years following Waterpod and other experiments in minimalist living, Mattingly began bundling discarded or transitional objects from her own life into temporary sculptural forms. Each bundle acted as a way to mark time, creating an ongoing archive of excess, memory, and movement.
The work was shaped by growing up with limited material resources and by inhabiting mobile, self-sufficient ecosystems. In contrast to large-scale public installations, Daily Bundle Sculptures offer an introspective counterpoint: small, accumulative actions that reflect the magnitude of global consumption on a deeply personal scale.
“After living ascetically on Waterpod, and earlier, growing up without much—I began bundling the objects I’d carried with me. It helped me make sense of the monumental flow of goods through my life. Each day, I would gather discarded things and tie them into bundles. It was a way to keep time. I still wonder what is more absurd: wrapping up these objects in an attempt to see them more clearly, or the sheer volume of material we collectively send to landfills every day.” —Mary Mattingly
Documentation
