If cows didn't like mustard screening

Presented alongside a selection of other moving image works curated by Lever and Meyle.

If cows didn’t like mustard departs from an 1882 event in which a batch of silver-gelatin coated glass plates—unknowingly incorporated with gelatin from cows fed on a diet rich in mustard plants—nearly destroyed the Eastman Dry Plate Company (later known as Kodak). Experimenting with the materiality of film—and the grains and particles that comprise its substance—the work considers the competing agency of humans, plants, animals and technology within the production of images and meaning.

If cows didn’t like mustard was commissioned for Open Window as part of Pause, Act, Void, Event (26 February – 19 July 2026) by The Govett-Brewster Gallery in Ngāmotu New Plymouth, Taranaki.

The Changing Room 2026 is proudly supported by The Chartwell Trust.⁠

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Lucy Meyle is an artist from Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, working in sculpture and publication. In her work, she explores ways of considering and relating to animals, and how regulation of their action is unevenly constructed through human colloquial/customary/legal structures. She makes work that draws the archival, the observed, and the absurd into material relation.

Ziggy Lever is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, whose work explores themes of temporality, site-specific installation, and perception through collaboration/cooperation, sound, moving image, sculpture, and installation. His work explores temporality in the detritus of industry and manufacturing processes, scientific making and contexts, and spaces of archival research. Lever considers materials as time-based documents that draw across temporal fields of installation. These come together in sometimes tenuous and provisional arrangements of things: image, intervention, and ephemera.