Prodigies and Portents, 2025
Archival pigment print
20 x 20 inches
Edition of 5, plus 2 APs
Mary Mattingly is an interdisciplinary artist who constructs and photographs fictional gardens, co-creates floating food forests and is determined to keep imagining utopia
Mary Mattingly’s series Night Gardens has an important subtext regarding our environment. Melancholy becomes a landscape, an alchemy of light and longing, brimming with texture, color, and life.
Mattingly shares, “These photographs draw from the ancient theory of the four humors which were each once thought to govern the body’s balance, mood, and temperament. Plants appear as companions in these states, standing in for cure, portent, and symptom alike.” Mattingly recently expanded on these thoughts in an essay in The Brooklyn Rail, in which she meditates on Robert Burton’s 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy, using his four humors as proposals for increasing our city’s civic spaces and social services.
We are also happy to share that Mattingly has been selected for the Spring 2026 Teiger Mentor in the Arts at at Cornell University’ College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.
Read “A City of Humors” in The Brooklyn Rail
Learn More about the Teiger Mentor in the Arts Program