Mickey’s work reflects human history through her documentation of simple, provocative titles found on library shelves around the world. Her work explores the shifting forms of information as we view systems change, digitise, and collections become deaccessioned. Her work can focus on simple, provocative titles that, through colour and scale, transcend the spines on which they appear, creating playful, anthropological, conceptual artworks.

One of Mickey’s earliest memories is of visiting a Carnegie Library in the Midwest with her grandfather when she was 5 years old. In 2016, Te Tuhi exhibited Mickey’s work on the 18 Carnegie libraries erected in New Zealand at the turn of the last century.

“There were a lot of these libraries in Minnesota – in every town you drove through. I remember the big, gilded staircase and the card catalogues. I was probably more fascinated by the building than the books at the time, but I was very engaged with the library.”

Early in her career, Mickey held an artist residency at Rainy Lake on the border of Minnesota and Canada. It was an island with housing containing 15,000 books, lining every wall of every building  “I started to photograph the collections of the architect who built the houses in the 1920's. Ernst Oberholzer was an avid book collector.

Mickey hasn’t stopped photographing them since. Books, collections, information and anything associated with it.

“The landscape of libraries has changed so much, and I have been privileged to witness that change, experience and document it. I feel there’s an urgency, not because I fear the change that is happening, but because perhaps I can help libraries communicate that change that sometimes the public doesn’t understand, particularly in New Zealand.”

She’s referring to deaccessioning, which she says is not an issue in the US and Europe, unlike in New Zealand. “Elsewhere, they understand that deaccessioning is necessary and part of the evolution of the library.”

As Aisling Quigley[i] says, libraries are not mausoleums.

“Libraries are creating spaces for a wider variety of stories and voices, and they need to adapt to the times. They are platforms for understanding artificial intelligence and changing to reflect how information and knowledge might now take form.”

“That doesn’t always come in a row of books on shelves. Libraries are microcosms of the communities that use their information, and how they do this is different now.”

In her current exhibition, Morphologies, at the Arts House Trust in Hillsborough, Auckland, Mickey presents work from her long-form documentary Volume, plus highlights from Denudation, As You Will: Carnegie Libraries of the South Pacific alongside new installation-based artworks. Morphologies ask us to consider our evolving relationships with books and the institutions that shape our collective cultural memory.

The exhibition originated in Minnesota, where Mickey is from, and toured to North Dakota and Nebraska and is now on view in Auckland. The organiser’s of the exhibition are hoping to bring it to the South Island and are currently looking for a venue.

The Carnegie work that appears in Morphologies has never been shown in New Zealand in print form. In her book, As You Will: Carnegie Libraries of the South Pacific (2018), Mickey documents the historic legacy of 23 Carnegie Libraries erected across the South Pacific, including 18 here in New Zealand.

Grounded in a conceptual investigation of knowledge, language, access and preservation Mickey hopes the work will elicit both intellectual and emotional responses. “Everyone has their own personal relationship to libraries and information, “ she explains, “and I hope viewers reflect on their own histories of seeking, discovering, and consuming knowledge when visiting Morphologies.”