TALKS + CLOSING RECEPTION
RETOOLING: Art, Ecology, & Climate Adaptation
Sunday, October 11
Talks | 4–6 PM
Closing Reception | 6–8 PM
What if an artwork could feed you, provide water, or change how you think about the resources and spaces we share?
Join MESH_ARTS for the closing day of Retooling, with two conversations that put retooling into practice through new approaches to food, water, and shared resources. One harvests water from the atmosphere; another creates floating food forests where harvesting is free and public. Both ask how creative practice can become a resource itself.
PETER YEADON + SPARK IP
SUNDAY, October 11th, 4-5 pm
Peter Yeadon joins SPARK IP for a deeper conversation around The Atmospheric Water Generator, a work-in-progress system that harvests moisture from extreme arid environments and converts it into water using biodegradable, plant-derived biocomposite materials.
Moving through three years of research, biomaterial testing, technical drawings, prototypes, and patents, the conversation will look closely at the process of translating an environmental question into a functioning tool. It will also consider the productive overlap between artistic experimentation, design, scientific research, and engineering. Within Retooling, the Atmospheric Water Generator expands the idea of creative practice as a form of ecological infrastructure.
The conversation will consider what art and design can become when the prototype itself is understood as a site of inquiry—something provisional, testable, and open to revision. In this sense, retooling is both an object and a method: a process of adapting materials, technologies, and ways of thinking to the ecological conditions in which we now find ourselves.
MARY MATTINGLY IN CONVERSATION WITH EDWARD MORRIS
SUNDAY, October 11th, 5-6 pm
Mary Mattingly is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose work spans public sculpture and photography with a focus on water. She co-builds absurd ecosystems and layered collages suggesting riparian futures.
Edward Morris is one half of the artist duo Sayler/Morris, along with Susannah Sayler. They work with photography, video, writing, and installation to examine our changing notions of nature, culture, and ecology. Their practice is often place-based and grounded in historical research.
This conversation will center on Swale, a long-term, community-led food access initiative that transforms New York’s waterways into civic spaces for environmental and economic justice. Built on repurposed barges, Swale creates floating food forests where the public can freely harvest perennial fruits, herbs, and vegetables. Part artwork, part public resource, and part proposition, Swale asks us to reconsider who has access to land, food, and shared space, and what might happen if those systems worked differently.
Swale speaks directly to a central question of Retooling: How can art become a tool for imagining, testing, and building new ways of responding to ecological change?
Morris will guide the conversation, drawing from his work with Toolshed, a project that gathers and shares tools for ecological living. Toolshed begins with the idea that ecological living means sharing resources, thinking across longer spans of time, and paying closer attention to the world in which we are already enmeshed.
Together, Mattingly and Morris will consider the artist as facilitator, organizer, and infrastructure-builder, and the artwork as a tool.
This conversation will be recorded as part of Toolshed's in-progress podcast series called "Art at Work”.
6–8 PM | CLOSING RECEPTION
Following the talks, join us for the closing reception of Retooling: Art, Ecology, & Climate Adaptation.
