Along the Lines of Displacement: A Tropical Food Forest
Living Sculpture | 2018 | Storm King Art Center, NY
Along the Lines of Displacement is a large-scale living sculpture that stages a speculative climate future through assisted plant migration. Installed at Storm King Art Center as part of the landmark exhibition Indicators: Artists on Climate Change, the work consists of transplanted tropical fruit trees—coconut, ponytail, and paurotis palms—relocated from USDA zones 8–9 (Florida) to zone 5 in the Hudson Valley, NY.
This sculptural food forest imagines the landscape of Storm King in a warming world, where projected temperature increases of 4°C (7.2°F) could make the region hospitable to tropical plants. By recontextualizing these trees in a colder climate, the work offers a living vision of ecological displacement, adaptation, and precarity.
Project Details
- Year: 2018
- Exhibition: Indicators: Artists on Climate Change
- Location: Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY
- Curated by: Nora Lawrence
- Dimensions: 60 x 50 x 22 ft (18.3 m x 15.2 m x 6.7 m)
- Materials: Paurotis palm (Acoelorrhaphe wrightii), ponytail palm (Beaucarnea recurvata), coconut palm (Cocos nucifera), soil, mulch, irrigation
- Themes: Climate projection, assisted migration, ecological dislocation, speculative planting, sculptural landscape
“Along the Lines of Displacement was about imagining a future climate through a living landscape. I wanted to confront the reality that, as temperatures rise, both people and plants will need to migrate. I had been following the US Forest Service's assisted plant migration trials, and wanted to suggest an extreme. These tropical trees don’t belong at Storm King now, but they may in 50 years. The project is a proposition and a provocation. What will grow here in the future? Who will be able to live here? I wanted to make those questions visible, and to stage an absurd living sculpture that’s unsettling and generative.” - Mary Mattingly
Installation Description
The work took the form of a living grove of tropical trees, carefully arranged in a field at Storm King to resemble both a plantation and a nursery. These species—typically grown in subtropical climates—were transported to the Hudson Valley and sustained through a temporary landscape intervention. Their presence was unfamiliar, even disorienting, in the temperate region.
Mattingly drew inspiration from the U.S. Forest Service’s experiments with assisted migration, where species are planted north of their natural range to anticipate the effects of climate change. The project also reflects the broader cultural implications of displacement and resilience: how bodies, plants, and ecosystems are forced to move and adapt in the Anthropocene.
By situating tropical food plants in a Northern landscape, the work anticipates ecological upheaval while engaging the viewer in a question: What does it mean to plant for a climate that doesn’t exist yet?
Exhibition Context
Along the Lines of Displacement was part of Indicators: Artists on Climate Change at Storm King Art Center (2018), a group exhibition curated by Nora Lawrence that brought together artists confronting the varied dimensions of the climate crisis through contemporary art. The project was designed to respond to site, scale, and time, and remains a significant example of Mattingly’s living ecological installations.
Documentation
