Nomadographies
Wearable Homes | 2006–2008
Nomadographies is an early body of work within Mary Mattingly’s long-term Wearable Homes series. The project investigates what shelter, mobility, and survival could look like under escalating climate change and widespread privatization of essential resources. Positioned somewhere between speculative architecture and performance, these sculptural suits imagine the necessity of a decentralized existence—one in which individuals are left to carry systems of basic survival on their bodies.
Initially developed in response to the privatization of water in Bolivia by Bechtel in 2000, the project emerged from Mattingly’s personal concerns about access to clean water and food, shaped by her own experiences growing up near the poverty line. The early suits were simple wearable shelters designed to carry rudimentary water collection and purification systems. Tested in extreme environments like the Oregon desert, they evolved into more complex and surreal forms—at times monstrous, always metaphorical—reflecting the growing absurdity of a world where survival had been outsourced to the individual.
The series critiques the commodification of life-sustaining resources while simultaneously offering real tools for adaptation. Each work documents a speculative future that is deeply personal and globally resonant. With titles like Inflatable Home, Passage, and Island Builders, the photographs and sculptures build a visual language of vulnerability, ingenuity, and uneasy independence.
Project Details
Years: 2006–2008
Locations: Oregon; Oregon Desert; exhibited internationally
Materials: Performance fabrics, reclaimed materials, inflatable structures, hand-built water purification kits, wearable architecture prototypes
"I started making and using water purification devices because I didn’t know how to access safe water, and that felt urgent. From there, I built wearable homes: tools for an imagined future of individual survival. But they also became a kind of personal mythology about resilience. I tested them alone in extreme places, trying to understand what it meant to be self-sufficient, if it was even possible, and realizing that survival without interdependence is a terrifying fiction." — Mattingly
Description
Nomadographies uses speculative design and performance to reflect on life at the edge of basic necessity. Responding to global patterns of displacement and environmental degradation, the series visualizes the tension between autonomy and precarity. Mattingly’s suits are both functional and fantastical—cocoons, tents, armor—each suggesting how individuals might adapt in a world where collective systems have failed. Their scale and strangeness underscore the absurdity of imagining survival as a solitary act, challenging viewers to reflect on what mutual care could look like in a future shaped by scarcity and climate extremes.
Nomadographies, 2008
Aqua 2000, 2011
Inflatable Home, 2008
Inflatable Home Drawing, 2008
Passage, 2008
Island Builders, 2006
What Hath God Wrought? 2006
Possibilities of Multilateral Communication, 2006
Go Forth and Multiply! (branded fruit), 2006