MICKEY SMITH, DAILY DEVOTION, 2025, Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 1550 x 1020 mm, edition 1 of 3

After decades of meticulously documenting periodical collections in long forgotten library basements artist Mickey Smith has turned her gaze toward titles found in second-hand bookshops. Smith sees these books as distant cousins to the official collection items that she has been documenting for years; describing them as ‘wild and homeless’ books that exude a palpable yet elusive history, and one which often asks for reinterpretation.

Virginia Woolf’s reflections on second-hand books in her essay Street Haunting, written while wandering the streets of London in the 1920s, contrasts library collections with the books circulating freely in the marketplace, and indeed the home, at the time. Here, Woolf describes second-hand bookshops acting as makeshift gathering places for diverse texts in transit. They may be ‘homeless’ yet they are perhaps the most poignant titles one might find – reflecting modern-day intellectual engagement and exchange.

Photographed in second-hand bookstores around the country, Domesticated invites us to explore the titles that have frequented the homes of Aotearoa. Some are rare titles, which we may never have witnessed, while others are wonderfully memorable and familiar. Smith’s images ask us to imaginatively reconstruct the physical and material lives of these publications, just as we might read their spines and imagine the stories within.

Much like portraits of human beings, Smith invites her audience to find meaning based on limited information and surface appearance. At the level of the skin, we are forced to judge a book by its cover. The artist shows reverence to this written ephemera that may otherwise have become forgotten. The photographs act as monuments and memorials to the texts; immortalising them in the way a portrait serves to preserve the essence of a person.

Opening event: Tuesday 29th April, 5.30-7pm