Ms.Interpreted

Mickey Smith has spent the past two decades tracing the shifting life of libraries… from card catalogues to digitisation, from stacks to AI, and what emerges here feels both forensic and strangely poetic. Bound periodicals become the central protagonists: once-circulating magazines and journals now compressed into uniform, colour-saturated volumes, their spines carrying only fragments of language. Kia ora, Endeavour, Artificial Intelligence, Lit, words that, when stripped from their original contexts, start to behave differently. They read as titles, as codes, as residues of knowledge systems.

What I kept returning to is this tension between reverence and redundancy. Libraries as custodians, but also as sites where knowledge is continually reorganised, retired, and reclassified. There’s something almost melancholic in those endless rows. Publications once urgent, now stilled into archival form, their afterlives determined by systems of cataloguing and storage.

Installed within the domestic, colonial architecture of the , the exhibition leans into its setting. The building itself echoes a kind of library logic: ordered, historical, authoritative, making the works feel like an extension of the space’s own memory.

Having spent time working in the short loan collection at the University of Auckland, I found myself drawn to the details: the typography on spines, the compression of time into binding, the small but telling shifts in how information is presented and preserved. It’s an exhibition that rewards that kind of attention.

A thoughtful, layered show that asks what happens to knowledge when it stops circulating, and what new meanings might still be recovered from its remains. Definitely one to spend time with. 📚 📚 📚

My son is Berlin Apollo. My daughter is Frida Artemis. Their middle names aren’t random, they’re a thread I tied between them, two and a half years apart, so they’d always carry something ancient and connected in common.

In mythology, Artemis arrived first. She was born, then immediately helped her mother deliver her twin brother Apollo. She was his protector before he even existed in the world.

Which makes it all the more poetic and slightly ironic that NASA named their first moon programme Apollo, and only returned to the Moon decades later under the name Artemis. The order is wrong. But the feeling is right.

These two works both live in Rome’s Borghese Gallery, and I’ll be standing in front of them later this year. Domenichino’s Hunt of Diana — Artemis in her full sovereign power. Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne — Apollo undone, reaching for something he can never hold.

Artemis. Apollo. Always together. Always in that order.

🌙 ☀️

Happy Easter to all our friends and family who follow the Julian calendar ✨

This is something we do every year, dyeing eggs traditionally, with onion skins, herbs and leaves, each one wrapped carefully in stockings so the patterns hold like little imprints of the world outside. It’s a ritual I love.

But this year, with the cyclone keeping us close to home and our Coromandel trip cancelled, it felt almost like the world made space for it. Like we were meant to stay in, lean into the process, and let the time stretch out a little longer than usual.

There’s something deeply calming about it, the repetition, the surprise of each egg as it reveals itself. Frida, of course, overseeing the whole operation.

Christos Voskrese 🪺

What a delight it was to visit Amanda Kemp’s studio and talk through her practice. Having known her for a while, it’s thrilling to see her stepping into a new space, her work growing in ambition, depth, and presence. I’ve had the pleasure of being commissioned to write about the pieces she’ll be showing at this year’s Aotearoa Art Fair as part of Kurutai Collective, curated by the wonderful 💫💫💫.

‘Kurutai’ in te reo Māori refers to the brackish waters where fresh and salt meet, a space of convergence and possibility. Amanda’s work draws directly from her ancestral whenua in Muriwai, Turanganui-a-Kiwa, using locally sourced uky (clay) and pigments that carry the histories and energies of the land. Her practice moves between ancestral forms, natural materials, and the transformative processes of firing, capturing the tension and dialogue between presence and absence, shadow and light, life and memory.

Do make sure to visit their booth at the fair. I’m so looking forward to seeing it come together 🖤🖤🖤