Water Clock
Sculptural Series | 2022–Ongoing | Multiple Locations
The Water Clock series involves flowing water, sculptural vessels, and organic materials to reflect on time, memory, healing, and ecological transformation. Each site-specific work invites viewers to contemplate impermanence and interconnectedness.
Project Description
Water Clock is an ongoing series of sculptural installations by Mary Mattingly that use water as both material and metaphor to measure time, memory, and transformation. Inspired by ancient clepsydras (water clocks) and ecological rhythms, each iteration is site-responsive and rooted in relationships with place, with bodies of water, and with people who sustain and are sustained by them.
These sculptures guide water through vessels made of steel, limestone, clay, and biochar, forming sonorous ecosystems that evoke medical life-support systems, mythological passageways, and glacial melt. The sound and motion of dripping water becomes a meditative timekeeper reflecting cycles of healing, loss, and change.
From floating gardens in canoes in Connecticut to a glacially-informed installation in the Italian Alps, the Water Clock series continues to evolve as sonorous and poetic infrastructure for contemplating impermanence and change.
Water Clock Memorial
2024 | East Haddam, Connecticut
This Water Clock is a quiet memorial: an ecosystem of floating gardens and vessels that guide water in a continuous, cyclical flow. Water drips from elevated points into steel trays, ceramic bowls, and limestone basins, creating a meditative sound that recalls muffled drums and wind chimes.
The flow of water down through each vessel reflects the passage of time, honoring those who have passed while carrying stories across symbolic thresholds. Two floating canoes host perennial hanging gardens, evoking vessels that move between realms. Visitors are invited to enter the space, sit with the sculpture, and listen—immersed in a temporal system shaped by water’s memory.
Water Body, Water Time
2023 | The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Water Body, Water Time is a time-based sculptural ecosystem on life support. Its steel framework holds biochar and limestone bowls, and water is distributed through medical tubing—evoking the tension between purification, survival, and fragility.
This piece marks a personal turning point in Mattingly’s work, confronting her own experience of illness and recovery from celiac disease. The tubing and trays resemble hospital equipment, yet the sculpture remains organic and slow-moving. Water becomes a metaphor for bodily healing as much as environmental renewal, linking personal and planetary cycles.
Lacrima
2023 | Museo delle Scienze (MUSE), Trento, Italy
Lacrima is a glacial water clock, inspired by the Marmolada glacier and the hydrologic cycles of the Dolomites. Co-designed with MUSE scientists and participants from the public workshop Un vaso per Mary, the sculpture gathers glacial melt in clay vessels made collaboratively during the residency.
The piece contemplates “climatic time”—the accelerated disappearance of ancient ice, and the role of water tables and traditional knowledge in holding memory over generations. Lacrima is a slow performance and a quiet call for renewed custodianship of water.
Clepsydra
2022 | Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador
Part of the installation Proposals, this Clepsydra explores the interplay of water, air, and plant life through a cascading system of vessels. Droplets fall into containers, producing a range of resonant sounds that poetically symbolize the passage of time.
Grounded in the belief that ecotopian art can catalyze social transformation, this work highlights the interdependencies between living systems and elemental forces. As a sculpture, it invites reflection on impermanence, vulnerability, and how ecosystems and cultures respond to environmental instability.
Water's Time
2022 | Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine
Water’s Time is a sculptural clepsydra. It cycles water through reclaimed plastic tubing, metal conduit, and restaurant trays, marking the ocean’s carbon sequestration process in a surreal and urgent gesture.
Between transportation, agriculture, and industry, nearly 5 million tons of carbon are produced every hour globally. This sculpture records the theoretical time it takes for oceanic systems to absorb 1 million tons—acknowledging that ocean acidification continues to slow that process. The piece critiques extractive infrastructures while drawing attention to water’s capacity, and its limits, as a planetary stabilizer.
