Bronte Heron, Finn Chadwick, Marilyn Jones
Stack Rat
22 October – 29 November 2025
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.
Images by Anton Maurer