22 October – 29 November 2025
Opening 22 October at 6:00pm
Stack Rat
Bronte Heron, Finn Chadwick, Marilyn Jones
There is a hotel somewhere in France built around a double helix staircase. Constructed in the centre of the building, it is designed for the hotel staff to be able to carry out their duties discreetly. Two doors on each floor allow access to one of two staircases that twirl around each other like strands of DNA.
A staircase like this also exists at the centre of Jorge Luis Borges’ seminal short story, The Library of Babel, in the form of the spine of a book. The circular book this strange staircase is wrapped around can be described as the core of the Library, a conceit used by Borges to visualise a universe. The humble librarian exists within and because of the Library, a complex system of information organised idiosyncratically. In other words, the librarian’s world is conceived of as an archive.
A “Stack Rat” is librarian slang for the worker that answers the request of a patron by retrieving their desired book (or “item”) from one of the many shelves (or “stacks”) in a library. This exhibition consists of the items and detritus brought forth from a great archive by the figure of the Stack Rat. RM Gallery becomes a site where this information is gathered and organised.
Another way to think of a library could be as a human brain, where thinking and remembering is the action of searching a vast catalogue of memory. Memory and its loss are central concerns of ours. What happens to an archive when parts of it disappear? What does the Stack Rat do when a patron’s request cannot be fulfilled? A classification system might begin to lose its meaning, falling further and further from the reasonable grounds of logic as it deteriorates.
22 October – 29 November 2025
Opening 22 October at 6:00pm
Prelude
Tess Walker Elliott
Prelude documents imagined projections of a settler woman’s life informed by the site and archives of Ewelme cottage in Pānera (Parnell) and the short stories of Katherine Mansfield.
In Mansfield’s Prelude, the mother, Linda, is frightened by the objects and furnishings around her ‘THEY were not deceived. THEY knew how frightened she was; THEY saw how she turned her head away as she passed the mirror.’
Haunted by the coming alive of these colonial objects, Linda sensed that ‘THEY wanted something from her and she knew that if she gave herself up and was quiet, more than quiet, silent, motionless, something would really happen’. These uprooted objects are not only a reminder of her own separation from and consequent longing for her homeland but represent the illusory belief in New Zealand as a new utopian home and her role within it – ‘watching for something to happen that just did not happen’.
Aware of this inbetweenness, the objects’ haunting reflects Linda’s own unsettled disillusionment. Her motionlessness and her silence emblematic of the general settler women’s complicity in the colonial project.
These photographs taken at Ewelme are concerned with the ‘home-maker’ who is both non-self-governing and culpable, who dutifully fills a land which has been surveyed, carved and hollowed with homes, objects and children. Prelude is an attempt at a kind of anamnesis – a recollection of a supposed previous existence – in the search for descent.
With thanks to Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.
Various Rooms: RM 1997 to 2022 (RM25)
Available now
Take a look inside here
RM25 is a non-exhaustive snapshot of RM, a selection of scans and screenshots from the archives presented in broadly chronological order.
It’s a book full of posters, photos, plans, invites, and a few letters and emails from the early rm3 days (and rm212, rm401, and rm103) through to the current form of RM.
RM25 is 226 pages, softcover, A5 size. Only 200 copies printed.
Priced at $40 per copy, with all proceeds going to RM.
Payment will be via bank transfer.
Shipping will be around $6 for orders placed within NZ.
For overseas orders, get in touch with us to confirm shipping costs.
Pick up a copy at RM, or order a copy here.
