Matthew Galloway put Methanex's locked-away plant models back on show (interview)

Economies of Deferral, curated by Simon Gennard at the Govett-Brewster Art Museum in New Plymouth, examines the environmental and political legacies of energy extraction in Taranaki. Galloway's two new works revisit the Muldoon government's Think Big era.

Show the never-seen plant models as artworks, and have 91-year-old former energy minister Bill Birch read aloud the letters his ministry wrote 50 years earlier.

Methanex lent scale models of the Motunui and Waitara Valley plants; in 'From the Minister of Energy', Birch — contacted in 2024 at 91 — reads ministry correspondence on camera, including honeymoon exemption requests.

The models are back in public view for the first time in close to a decade; Birch died just before opening, giving the filming the weight of a final recorded word. The show runs to 15 November 2026.

In an interview with The Post, Pōneke artist Matthew Galloway describes two new works in Economies of Deferral, Simon Gennard's exhibition at the Govett-Brewster Art Museum on the legacies of energy extraction in Taranaki. Both examine Think Big, the Muldoon government's late-1970s and 80s infrastructure push for energy self-sufficiency after the oil shocks. Motunui was a world-first plant meant to turn offshore gas into synthetic petrol; privatised in 1990, it now belongs to Methanex.

Looking for a visitor centre he had heard about, Galloway found it locked and dark — closed to the public for close to a decade — with models of the Motunui and Waitara Valley plants sitting degraded inside. Methanex lent them for 'Fragments of the Motunui Synthetic Petrol Plant Visitor Centre': the optimistic, decontextualised models — 'god-mode', as he puts it — stand in front of the runoff, spills and politics the real site carries. Methanex, he says, had its own unresolved question about what happens to the objects.

The second work, 'From the Minister of Energy', grew from a search for carless-days windscreen stickers in the national archives that instead surfaced correspondence between the public and the ministry: complaints, exemption requests, people asking to drive on their honeymoon. Galloway contacted former energy minister Sir Bill Birch in 2024, when he was 91 and still working as a surveyor, and filmed him reading the letters his ministry had written 50 years earlier. Birch died just before the show opened.

Galloway says art lets competing truths sit together without resolution, closer to how infrastructures actually work on people, and that negotiating with Methanex and Birch kept him from critiquing from the outside. Economies of Deferral, which also features Fiona Clark, Ngahuia Harrison, Ho Rui An, Darcy Lange and John Miller, runs at the Govett-Brewster until 15 November 2026.

The models spent nearly a decade locked in a closed visitor centre, mirroring the unresolved fate of the plant itself.

A model shows the plant with none of the runoff, spills or politics — the pairing forces both readings into one room.

The archives held no carless-days stickers, only human correspondence, which turned the plan into Birch reading his ministry's own letters.

Birch, 91 and still working as a surveyor, agreed to read the letters aloud; his death just before opening made the record a last word.

Corporate relics can carry the argument: objects locked in a visitor centre say more about an energy era than any panel of facts.

Economies of Deferral runs at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Museum until 15 November 2026. The works leave open the questions they came from: Methanex still faces an unresolved question over the models and the plant's long-term future, and the ministry correspondence Birch read on camera now forms a public artwork rather than a closed archive.