Holding Water
Installation + Archive | 2025 | James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center
Holding Water is a sculptural installation and research-driven archive that centers water as a political, material, and spiritual force within New York City’s watershed. Presented at the James Gallery at CUNY, the exhibition responds to the volatility of water systems, revealing their potential to nourish, disorient, destabilize, and transform.
Drawing inspiration from architect and theorist Dilip da Cunha, Holding Water calls for a “water ethos”: a shift in how life is organized around water, rather than land. In this context, water is a measure, a memory, and a mode of relation. The installation explores this shifting terrain through sculpture, poetic text, cartography, and collaborative inquiry, offering a living archive of ecological, bodily, and geological encounters with water.
Project Details
- Year: 2025
- Location: James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, NYC
- Media: Sculpture, collage, video, cartographic drawing, archive
- Materials: Watershed soil, reclaimed netting, tide-collected salt, local clay, biochar, water from city rivers, found objects from flood zones
“How does memory show up in a public space? Here, water is volatile, fragile, violent, serene, elusive, ubiquitous, nourishing, devastating, in need of protection, and fundamental to life. In Holding Water, I wanted to gather these contradictory experiences into one reflective space, a listening room, to feel what it means to live within a system of flows and ruptures. This work maps and responds to our shared histories with water: how it sustains, how it shifts ground beneath us, and how it asks us to redefine what we mean by structure, rhythm, and relationship.” - Mattingly
Exhibition Description + Installation Views
Through a series of sculptural interventions and archival gestures, Holding Water invites viewers to consider the fluctuating role of water in shaping environments and social systems. The installation includes condensation sculptures, salt-drawn maps, and poetic visualizations of NYC’s buried streams and drinking water infrastructure—offering a decolonial reading of the watershed that holds the city.
Referencing da Cunha’s call to replace a land-based “terra firma” mentality with a fluid, immersive sensibility, the exhibition proposes new spatial terms: ebb, buoyancy, drift, rhythm, depth. These terms become aesthetic and philosophical tools in Mattingly’s work, reframing water as a site of both disorientation and potential realignment.
The project builds on Mattingly’s broader practice of sculptural ecosystems that advocate for access to food, shelter, and clean water. From the floating food forest Swale to her ongoing water clock installations, Mattingly’s work continues to activate public dialogue and structural reimagination around ecological systems.
Curator’s Note
“This exhibition of new artwork is a living archive of the physical—geological and bodily—experiences and processes of water in our local watershed. Holding Water reframes water as a force that both unsettles and heals, challenging fixed notions of land, power, and protection.”— Katherine Carl, Curator
Artist Biography
Mary Mattingly has built sculptural ecosystems around the world that prioritize access to food, water, and shelter. Her public artwork Swale (2016), a floating food forest on a barge in New York, navigated marine common law to make edible landscapes accessible to all—and inspired NYC Parks to launch their first public “Foodway” at Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx.
Her work has been exhibited at institutions including Storm King Art Center, the International Center of Photography, Palais de Tokyo, Seoul Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, Barbican Art Gallery, and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana. Mattingly is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the James L. Knight Foundation, Harpo Foundation, NYFA, and the Jerome Foundation. She has been featured in Art21, The New York Times, and international publications and documentaries.