MICKEY SMITH

Domesticated

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Domesticated by Mickey Smith.

'Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

― Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting'

After decades of meticulously documenting periodical collections in long-forgotten library basements, in Domesticated, artist Mickey Smith turns her gaze toward titles found in Aotearoa’s second-hand bookshops. Smith sees them as distant cousins to official collection items, as wild and homeless books exuding a palpable yet elusive history, and one which often begs reinterpretation — leaving the viewer to ponder their past, present and possible futures.

Virginia Woolf’s reflections on second-hand books in her essay Street Haunting, written while wandering the streets of London in the 1920s, contrast library collections with the myriad books circulating more freely in the marketplace. Here, Woolf positions libraries, be they public or private, as ‘homes’ for books, whereas second-hand bookshops are framed as makeshift gathering places for diverse texts in transit. They may be ‘homeless’, yet are, perhaps, neither lost nor found.

Domesticated invites us to imaginatively reconstruct the material lives of these publications, just as we might read their spines and conjure the stories within. Yet much like photographic portraits of human beings, audiences are invited to make meaning based on limited information and surface appearance. At the level of the skin, we are forced to judge a book by its cover.

Yet Smith seems to set up viewers to catch themselves in the act of appraisal. Epistemological questions haunt and playfully problematise our potential interpretations of these photographs: how do we think we know something about the ‘home lives’ of these books? And what of their contents? Based on what evidence? Yet our readings are no forensic reconstruction or scientific enquiry; they are far more speculative, associative, even poetic.

The books’ titles, in concert with their visual grammar, offer the primary evidence that grounds our roaming interpretations: typography, printing and binding techniques, and use of colour and illustration, for example. They are collectively designed to communicate, but also to persuade: open me, look at me, read me, buy me, make me yours.

In Smith’s distinct treatment of the natural light available in the environments where she encounters the books themselves – in the wild, as it were – these visual and material qualities are foregrounded. Gilded text glimmers and glows as raking light illuminates their worn surfaces. Angular highlights and shadows are set against a deep black void, an oblivion the books look to have emerged from, or may, perhaps, recede back into. Her camera is close, presenting intimate, even private encounters with her subjects. Her vantage point is often low, imbuing the books with a kind of implied presence or personality. In some cases, they are framed to appear almost like buildings or monuments, just as they retrace architectures of thought and feeling in which we may have collectively dwelled. At times the lens is positioned at an angle to the subject, the narrow, skewed focal plane suggesting a kind of intersubjective encounter – of reading and being read.

Domesticated also foregrounds the lives of women, alongside historical narratives which appear to be primarily made by, for or about women. The titles of selected photographs, mimicking and riffing on the book titles they depict, could be read as making reference to restrictive and obsolescent gender roles. Examples include THE GIRL’S OWN (Promise) (2023), THE SLEEPING PRINCESS (2023), and WOMAN AT HOME (2023). The titular book ‘WOMAN AT HOME’ is filed next to ‘SWEETHEART AT HOME’ and ‘THE OLD IDENTITIES’. Here, Smith may also refer to the oppressive conflation of domesticity and womanhood, yet throws this into somewhat ironic relief. In this context, MARRIED & GONE TO NEW ZEALAND (2025) can also be playfully and critically read against the grain.

In other works, we are invited to imagine the kinds of ‘DAILY DEVOTION’ and ‘HOME FUN’ the book titles refer to. LAST (2025), depicting a more recent publication (evident in its typography and binding), seems to also address our situation in the here and now. In the geopolitical context of 2025 – with ‘diverse’ and democratic culture being reframed, dismantled, deleted and destroyed within an unlawful neofascist framework, where restrictions on public and cultural institutions and the content they produce and publish are escalating, where the natural environment is experiencing compounding existential crises, and where what many of us thought we knew as safe and stable is coming to an end – this title resonates in a quiet yet impactful way. “Last what?” one might ask. The last books? The last of us?

In this context, and pushed to its logical extreme, one might anticipate the resurgence of printed publications in second-hand bookstores as offline safe havens for books whose contents are deemed ‘wild’ in the near future. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Perhaps our futures will be more offline that we think.

Hovering in the spaces between media and message, these images are, at one level, facts about fictions, yet the opposite is also true. Like the books they portray, these photographs appear to resist the potential desire to tame and contain them.

Woolf also seems to suggest that ‘homeless’ books can become perfectly ‘at home’ in one’s pocket or bag, travel companions on our passage through life. She goes on, “Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.”

Smith’s recent work asserts that while books may oscillate between phases of homelessness and domestication across their lifetimes and beyond ours, their ideas and expressions will ultimately wander and remain wild.

― Emil McAvoy, April 2025

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