I am a land and cultural worker most concerned with cultivating caring spaces that nurture reflection and dialogue to work towards personal and social transformation. I’m excited about finding abundant and playful entry-points to access the kind of radical imagination that helps to mobilize movements centered in love and reciprocity. I look to nature as teacher for how we can learn to be with each other differently, and learn new ways of showing up for each other. My support of social-emotional learning is at the service of healing justice: believing personal growth opens portals to new possibilities in collective liberation. I offer up my creativity, reverence for ritual, and commitment to play in an effort to create replicable and collaborative models for re-storying how we show up as humans in interdependent ecosystems.
Questions I’m sitting with:
Where in my body have I tucked pieces of the land?
How do I regenerate the wilds within my body?
What changes in me in a changing climate?
Through gardening, assemblage of natural and discarded materials, photography, analog collage, poetics, and facilitating collective educational experiences in nature, I play with ideas of magic, memory, eco-grief, and collective care through investigating phenology, the study of cycles and seasons in a changing climate. I look to myth and language to make and manipulate meaning from ecological processes and phenomena, orienting closely towards interconnected ecologies and that which is regenerative within them.
I feel both the tension and possibility of relating to the world through the orderly tending of a garden and being with the wild and wayward of uncultivated land and sea. I allow my body to sit in these paradoxes. Attuning to my internal landscape, I connect to metaphors of habitat fragmentation, while also looking to what the wild can teach me in healing, belonging, and resiliency. Through somatic practices of moving my body to fit a landscape, I seek to return to the body through a return to the land. I nurture connection to nature in community through therapeutic horticulture and collective art-making.
Biography
Mallory is a land and cultural worker whose work to support eco-literacy, arts education, and social-emotional learning for youth, families, and intergenerational audiences is at the service of getting in right relationship to land. Born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, a post-industrial town nicknamed as “a gateway city” to the American dream by the state of MA, Mallory grew up around paper mills and plastic factories that later became derelict after leaving the community underemployed and with polluted waterways, toxic soil, and ruderal landscapes–which she is now beginning to repair her own relationship with. This way of restoring relationship to land that’s been harmed alongside personal healing of childhood trauma has fueled Mallory’s work today. Mallory is working towards her certification in horticultural therapy, and partners these healing modalities with a healing justice framework at the service of centering love and collective care—for people, plants, and planet.
Mallory currently runs intergenerational programming in the learning garden, greenhouse, and kitchen, and at the Greenhouse Education Center at Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park for the New York Horticultural Society. She is on the Board of Directors for Awakenings Art, an organization that centers the artistic expression of survivors of sexual violence. She serves on the Foodway Steering Committee for Bronx River Alliance to support food justice and cultural programming in New York City’s only edible food forest.
Mallory has co-created programming rooted in regenerative education and nature-based artmaking with Queens Botanical Garden, Grow NYC, NYC Department of Civic Engagement, Wave Hill Public Gardens and Cultural Center, The Katonah Museum, Chicago Parks District, Chicago Public Schools, Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Chicago, Jane Adams Hull House, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Open Engagement, Teachers for Social Justice, The Women’s Center at Depaul University, among others. Her work has been funded by the Bronx Council of the Arts, Crossroads Fund, Terra Arts Foundation, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Night Out in the Parks, Harlem Community Development Corporation, The Burpee Foundation, the Dorr Foundation, among others. Her curriculum and facilitation work has been featured in Transform the Harm, The New York Times, Bronx News, Teaching Artist Podcast, All of It WNY, and The Art of Flocking Curriculum.