City Ecologists

Ailsa Coulson, in response to AFTER HOURS by Elise McDermott and Phoebe Laird.

I walk around the city. Any city. But these, ours, are collective in their undulating states of decay and growth. Civic togetherness grows in weeds in cracks, peeling signage, nooks of painted over graffiti, discards of built and used. When describing this duet to Elise and Phoebe, who proposed individually, I spoke of city scenes; the ecological city haze of shops, streetlights and walking through designated spaces, leading us through to the space of the gallery and its context.

McDermott and Laird build languages surrounding a lineage of object and material. They feel like collectors. Elise describes finding the wood planar for the base of Subway at a local second hand shop. Phoebe tells me she found all of the little spikes from When was the last time you saw the streetlights turn on? in the gutters of Pōneke, scrounging the internet to find out they were mechanical street-cleaner bristles that had broken off the machines. The previous lives of these materials, be they found or broken from their function, have a charge of story to them, but the play is performed by the re-arranging. McDermott carefully constructing a sateen cash register in Checkout with nuts and bolts for buttons, or the industrial pieces of steel and concrete Laird conducts as a new structure with re-newed function in the gallery space.

I think of Judy Darragh, assembling with op-shop objects, then disassembling only to return them to her collection, ready for new transformation into art, filled with new and old meaning. Natasha Conland described this shift as “the final intervention; it alters these objects' signification - from Darragh’s collection to art - but leaves the trace of their origins visible to the viewer.”

These forms - swept in or built in - to the gallery, come with their own logic, their own sensibility. Constructing objects that reference familiarity in a shrug, but deny you the absolute state. In Civic and Mountain Dew, McDermott references local commercial landscapes, through a kind of kitsch-nod in miniature, pulling closer attention to these aesthetics, rather than the overwhelm of an enveloping shop environment. In When was the last time you saw the streetlights turn on? Laird references use and disuse in a similar way, choreographing a new kind of language from once dead materials, as Matthew Whiteman writes of her work; “She has gifted these objects both a new power of poetic speech and a stage from which to deliver it.”.

Waste has become an existential concern, and art made from discards has a place all the more relevant, engaging us with our environments. In AFTER HOURS there are questions about the social fabric, where trade networks in second hand goods address both access and concern, and repurposed objects of trash act as disruption and contention to the hierarchy of objects. I think of cars running on fryer grease, of chairs fixed with plastic pipping, of innovating on the fringes.

I think of movement through public space. Through the needs of safety and convenience our movements are often orchestrated more than we would think, our way guided by streetlight, or guided through supermarket aisles. Jenny Odell’s 2019 book How to do nothing references a phenomenon of “scripted” or faux public places, described by Eric Holding and Sarah Chaplain, as places that appear like a public space but where behaviours and uses are directed, supervised, constructed and orchestrated. As free space and civic togetherness erodes through privatisation, how is our understanding of these passing by spaces, through walking, urban observation and need, reflected in the gallery?

But this movement is also a part of the movement of objects towards Elise and Phoebe and then on toward Window Gallery. Through a kind of zen flow of city life, the French surrealists would call it objet trouvé, the object finds you. We move through urban space like ants on an anthill, and crossing our paths are the discarded: objects with their journeys coming to our artists’ collections. In the 2008 documentary Examined Life, Slavoj Zizek sweeps his arm toward a garbage dump and announces “True ecologists love all this”. This notion carries with it a downstream sentimentality for the objects cast off by us urban ants, and as city ecologists, our artists bring our close attention, through the works in their singularity, to the web of life in the city.

This show presents an unfolding conversation between Window, the artists, their artworks, and the city. In a small act of passing by between public environments, from the shops and thoroughfares of the university to the quiet space of the library, engagement becomes double; in movement, and in a closer noticing, we direct an unscripted attention as opposed to that given out on the street. When the streetlight turns on, we are on our way home, or outside the opening; we stop and notice. Through collection and care AFTER HOURS is a transient theatre of life as it is lived collectively, in space, and in material.

1. Natasha Conland, Judy Darragh, So…you made it?. (Wellington, Te Papa Press, 2004), 15.

2. Matthew Whiteman, glossolalia, Essay alongside Exhibition “Wear Time”, Phoebe Laird, Uinedo95 Gallery, Pōneke, 9th-14th September, 2025.

3. Jenny Odell, How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Melville House, 2020.

4. Examined Life, directed by Astra Taylor, (Sphinx Productions and the National Film Board of Canada, 2008). Documentary.

5. Jackson, Bena Zan. “Here We All Are: Sculpture, Ingenuity, and Urban Environments”. Masters in Fine Art Exegesis, Massey University Wellington, 2023.link

6. Judy Darragh, interview by ArtFair Aotearoa, July 2026, Judy Darragh on found objects, humour and unease,link.