Night Gardens
Photographic Collage | 2023–Ongoing
Night Gardens is a series of photographic collages that explores the garden as a site of myth, memory, adaptation, and ecological change. Layering photographs of plants, riparian zones, aquariums, fabric and cut-paper motifs, the works conjure speculative landscapes where cultivated flora, wild growth, and climate-shifted ecosystems overlap.
Rooted in symbolic and material histories of gardens. From ancient Egyptian mythologies to the stubborn resilience of thistles, this series invites viewers into intimate spaces of quiet transformation. Each collage holds an interplay between randomness and control, growth and decay, revealing the garden as a world both tended and untamed.
Project Details
- Years: 2023–Ongoing
- Medium: Photographic collage using digital layering, fish tanks, mirrors, water, paper cutouts, fabric, paint, and plant materials
- Themes: Adaptation, plant migration, ecological change, mythology, ritual, the garden as commons
“Gardens are like poems—small acts of care that tether us to something greater. In Night Gardens, I imagine what happens when the garden floods, or drifts, or migrates. I’m drawn to the riparian zones, the amphibious thresholds where earth becomes water and resilience blooms. These collages bring together layered photographs and fragments—mirrors, tanks, thistles, lilies—inviting new myths to form in the shifting dark.” - Mary Mattingly
Series Description
In Night Gardens, Mattingly turns her attention to the garden as a site of surrender, unpredictability, and deep-time knowledge. Each collage blends photography with mirrored surfaces, underwater imagery, and botanical emblems, from baby's breath to lotuses, and evoking floodplains, memory-scapes, and submerged worlds.
The images imagine gardens that exist between water and land, control and collapse; spaces where plants mutate, migrate, and survive in altered environments. Inspired by mythological references, such as Re emerging from the waters of the Nile or the ghostly glow of the will-o'-the-wisp, the works suggest that adaptation is biological, spiritual and narrative. The garden becomes a container of cosmology: a portal for listening, resisting domestication, and attuning to the wildness that always returns.
Images
Related Press + Essays
GOINGS ON: Art
BY THE NEW YORKER
Mary Mattingly’s photographs of moonlit gardens turn the Robert Mann gallery into a hallucinatory hothouse. Vivid and wild with masses of real, handmade, and computer-generated flowers, Mattingly’s compact landscapes are at once otherworldly—sci-fi at its most seductive—and as familiar as natural-history dioramas. But they’re not just pretty pictures. The artist has long been known for work (including site-specific sculpture) that takes on environmental issues with engaging subtlety. Here, the gardens often appear to be sinking or submerged as rising seas threaten to turn earthly Edens into swampland. In one image, translucent, jewel-like jellyfish caps float like a squadron of U.F.O.s above a darkened field of flowers, invaders from our own mutating planet. —Vince Aletti
Enchanting Night Gardens Collages Celebrate the Precious Beauty of Night-Blooming Plants [Interview]
By My Modern Met
Much like an artwork, an ecosystem depends upon precision. It demands the perfect set of elements, functioning in harmony, in order to be effective. This comparison between art and nature isn’t lost on artist Mary Mattingly, whose work primarily focuses on environmental concerns. Throughout her career, Mattingly has been influenced by her upbringing in an agricultural town near Springfield, Massachusetts, where drinking water was polluted by various chemicals. The experience, she says, informed her fascination with “sculptural ecosystems,” each of which explores food, shelter, clean water, and climate change.
Visit My Modern Met for the full article.
bathing in nature
By Aesthetica Magazine
There is no question that spending time in nature is good for your physical and mental health. Mary Mattingly’s (b. 1978) extensive photographs bottle the transformational quality of nature. The artist drew inspiration from a moonlit walk around Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. Informed by the blossoming and changing flora, Night Gardens considers the wild and shifting relationships between different lifeforms, humans included.
Visit Aesthetica Magazine for the full article.
9 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows This Season
BY Magnifissance Magazine
In this mesmerizing series, Mattingly invites viewers into a world where the natural and the surreal collide. The exhibition features twelve meticulously crafted images that explore gardens as evolving ecosystems, brimming with texture, color, and life. By blending physical elements such as plants, flowers, and fabric with digital manipulation, Mattingly creates magical environments that transcend the ordinary.
Visit Magnifissance Magazine for the full article.
Floral Dreams by Artist Mary Mattingly
By MSN
Anyone traveling into New York City from one of the nearby airports can see that here is a natural wetland—one that happens to support millions of people. Rivers and waterways define the lay of the land, feeding into the very close Atlantic Ocean. So photographer Mary Mattingly’s Night Gardens (now showing at Robert Mann Gallery on 26th Street), in which groupings of plants are imagined in a riparian environment, is very much connected with reality.
Visit MSN for the full article.
Mary Mattingly: Night Gardens
by Musée Magazine
The exhibition invites viewers to discover the hidden beauty of gardens at night—an otherworldly realm where the textures, colors, and life of these plants flourish in a way never seen before.
Visit Musée Magazine for the full article.
Night Gardens
By Meer
Flower blooms at night invite us to delve into enchanting gardens after dark. Gardens require attention and care, slowly growing and evolving. The gardener must listen and negotiate the vast will and system of its universe. Each plant carries histories, symbolisms, mysteries, and mutations, emerging in these collages as emblems of adaptation.
Visit Meer for the full article.
Night Gardens is represented by Robert Mann Gallery, New York. For inquiries, please visit robertmanngallery.com.