Matt Arbuckle Public Capacity
essay by Romily Plourde Marbrook
In Auckland City Hospital’s labyrinth of linoleum floors, you will find multi-coloured lines snaking through various wards and hallways. The lines are colour coded, and enable the visitor to orient themselves throughout the building. The problem with following a line is that you don’t immediately know what direction to follow; to find out you have to start walking. Matt Arbuckle’s exhibition Public Capacity centers on this concept of colour as guide and trajectory, stemming from the four months Arbuckle and his family spent in Starship Children’s Hospital, while his son Francis underwent life-saving surgeries.
Their days during this time were dictated by the readings of pH strips that would determine whether their son’s nasogastric tube was correctly placed, something which had to be repeated every three to four hours. An unfavourable reading could upend days at a time, tangling Matt’s family within hospital bureaucracy and medical imaging devices.
Occupation in time, 28 of 183 days NGT PH strips 2025-26, sit in their frames, a gradient wall of yellow to orange, sometimes imperceptibly shifting to a muddy blue or brown. In others, outlying squares disrupt the monotonous rows of colour; a rusted orange square in a line of endless greens. Sometimes a square is missing, having fallen off the strip, potentially buried within the hospital landfill or wedged between a Hii-Rom hospital bed. The act of collecting the strips is reminiscent of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ use of multiples in his Candy works, in their examination of time and illness. The strips are delineations of hours, almost confrontational in their turbulent veering away from the sequences we initially adjusted to. They are tallies, counting down intervals, wobbling seismically from left to right as Arbuckle’s course would shift between readings.
Alongside the framed pH strips, a hospital curtain hangs off a powder blue rail; a colour often used in hospital interiors, partly due to its associations with tranquillity. Its title, 5 and below, good to go, was a mnemonic used by hospital staff to identify safe pH thresholds. The curtain is made from a sheet of voile draped off hooks; a fabric central to Arbuckle’s practice. Removed from the stretcher, its materiality shifts in meaning. The reds and yellows stained in the curtain mirror the shades of the strips, but stray from their uniformity and rigidity. The pigments bleed into one another, loose and untethered, their interaction to the fabric following no set formula, orienting themselves into more organic forms. The imprint of the tiled floor of Arbuckle’s studio is transferred onto the fabric, further abstracting the curtain from its clinical origins, reincarnated into a kind of gentle horizon.
The hospital curtain functions as a wall in a transient space. It presents patients and carers with an illusion of privacy, keeping sickness out of sight through its gauzy fabric. It does not muffle sound, it hides half of the upright body, and all of the supine body. Everybody murmurs in a hospital ward, in automatic adjustment to new systems of communication. There is no way to knock to announce oneself, nurses and doctors do this through the clinking of the plastic curtain loops, accompanied by a harried hello, or an apology for delay. Arbuckle’s curtains are open, in invitation. Gently fluttered by the tailwind of a visitor, or a gust of wind carried by an open door, the possibilities of a hospital, or healing are revealed in the spaces behind the curtains.
Arbuckle’s synthesis of these parts of the hospital is reminiscent of Ruth Buchanon’s exhibition Bad Visual Systems (2016). Buchanan’s exploration of how bodies experience culture, language and means of categorisation within the institution functioned as a way to challenge the feeling of being overpowered by these spaces. Arbuckle employs a similar methodology to examine the months he spent living in Starship. The hospital is ordered through a complex convergence of clinical language, staff hierarchy, architecture and body. The objects from this space that he has collected and recreated recontextualise their place within the hospital system. Echoing their origins within a chaotic medicalised network, the objects serve as a way to orient oneself, resituating them in order to remember the human element of care central to the functioning of these systems.
Arbuckle tells me they eventually came to recognise hospital staff by seeing their shoes through the gaps between the curtains. Shoes are one of the few signifiers of self in the uniform blue of scrubs. The curtain track branches into two paths, reflecting the split from normality and routine that periods of trauma bring to life. One of the meandering lines on the hospital floor will eventually lead the patient outside of the emergency room doors, in a world removed from medical systems, bringing its own form of relief and alienation. Red returns to the evening sky, and green to grass and trees.