I ran out of names

Jhana Millers is pleased to present a new solo exhibition, I ran out of names, with Caroline McQuarrie.

Artist talk 11–12pm, opening 12–2pm, Saturday 31 October

Exhibition runs 31 October – 21 November 2026

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

In 2023, while on The Gullies Art Residency on a farm in the Rangitīkei, Caroline McQuarrie endeavoured to make lists of the plants and birds she observed. She started a page in her journal, imagining a flourishing glossary of nature building up over time. Very soon, however, she came up against the limits of her ability to identify what she was seeing – making a melancholy note in her journal: ‘I ran out of names for the birds’.

Continuing on from The land, again, exhibited at Aratoi Museum of Art and History in early 2026, I ran out of names draws attention to the constructed nature of landscape in Aotearoa, examining the extractive colonial worldview imposed upon whenua and the profound transformations that followed.

The exhibition explores how photography mediates the way these landscapes are viewed, packaging them neatly within a photographic frame before allowing them to fall apart through material transformation. Moving between traditional photography and cross-stitch embroidery, McQuarrie considers how histories of settlement, extraction and land use continue to shape the ways these landscapes are viewed, understood and culturally framed in the present.

Quote from William Faulkner. Requiem for a Nun. 1951.