Limnal Lacrimosa was a  free public art installation at 5 6th Avenue West in Kalispell Montana. As the days grew shorter, it was open Mondays from 4-6pm by appointment and for listening hours on Sunday evenings from July 2021 - April 2022.

Limnal Lacrimosa was sited in the original home of the Kalispell Malting and Brewing Company. It celebrates the richness of the valley, from the glaciers and lakes to the cultural histories including art and ceramics.

To build the exhibition, American artist Mary Mattingly collected snow melt and rainwater, some that had dripped through holes in the building’s roof. Cycling water through tubing just below the ceiling, she evoked the feeling of rain inside the building. Like a large water clock, the building was a meditation on water-courses. The drips were caught in lachrymatory vessels while the sounds of the droplets hitting the containers echo throughout the space. Eventually the vessels would fill, and water would spill onto the floor before the cycle would repeat itself. Slowing in the colder months and speeding up in the warmer months, the drips kept time.

The artwork was prompted by Kōbō Abe’s novel The Woman in the Dunes, a story about two people who must forever remove sand from a building. It was driven by the speed of geologic change in Glacier National Park, or Glacier Time. Over the course of nine (Gregorian calendar) months, the exhibition space inside of 5 6th Avenue West transformed several times.

Mattingly is known for her large-scale installations that address ecology like a mobile free public food forest on a barge in New York City and an education center for estuarial plants on the Thames in London. Her photographs and sculptures are represented by the Robert Mann Gallery in New York. She visited Kalispell for the first time in 2020.

Artist Website - Mary Mattingly.com