Dane Mitchell’s artwork embraces ideas and concepts which are as poetic in their execution as in their inspiration. His latest exhibition, The Imponderables, explores the little-known archipelago of Svalbard which lies north of the Arctic Circle alongside polar bears, the island’s only indigenous occupants, and the Global Seed Vault, a local facility that stores seeds in case of cataclysmic environmental loss. In his hands, a series of interconnected and ‘imponderable’ ideas feel important to understand, to elevate.

This is Mitchell’s first exhibition for The Renshaws in Brisbane, and it opened on the same weekend as the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art’s 11^th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Mitchell’s interest in Svalbard as a ‘non-place’, to which no human may lay claim, emerges in stark contrast to the ownership and connection to place addressed by the APT. His exploration of concepts that relate to permanence, loss, and what may be collected is elusive and ineffable, turning ideas inside out. This sits at the heart of his practice.

“This exhibition comes out of my encounter with a place that is a non-place,” he says. “No-one is from Svalbard, and it’s somewhat indifferent to us. There’s something quite beautiful about being confronted with a place or geology or landscape or site as being not somehow in relation to us, but in relation to other forces.”

Svalbard is, he says, a “heterotopia”; a non-site and a non-place. “You don’t need a passport when you arrive. There’s no border control in the sense that anybody can be there. It’s not a country and, by treaty, you’re not allowed to be born there or die there. It’s on the brink, on the edge, on a precipice of even being a place. Yet it’s also emblematic of the environmental loss that we’re all confronting.”

The Imponderables, which takes its name from the term for a group of homeopathic treatments, includes Ursus Maritimus (for Loneliness and Introspection) (2024), a large industrial vat of homeopathic remedy, and a stainless-steel flask containing the aroma from Sea World’s polar bear enclosure. It also includes two large, scanned images of polar bear paws from a pelt in the Svalbard Museum, and framed images and letters from Mitchell (including to the Polar Bear Supervisor at Sea World) that are sculptural in their placement as white written sheets on a black background void. In the second room are similarly large and scanned images taken from the doors of the Global Seed Vault, Sun Hole (2024), two tiny photographs of holes poked into mud into which Mitchell deposits homeopathic remedies containing light emitted from the sun and off the moon, and The Imponderables (2024) tiny bottles labelled ‘Sol’ and ‘Luna’ shaken on lab stirrers. The installation is pristine, with clean shiny industrial elements, yet what unites these works is absence, a sense of loss that is at once intellectual and deeply felt.

“I’m interested in the world more than myself”, Mitchell tells Art Guide Australia. “I have an underlying interest in different structures of the world, and that’s led me to forms of knowledge containment—museums and galleries and zoos and encyclopedias and ways that we try to contain and hold the world.”

His artistic approach is to leave no trace; in Svalbard a scanner was used to inspect the collected polar bear pelts, and the Global Seed Vault doors by pressing up against their surface to flatten the information into data. Unlike a camera, they allow the view to be inverted, indexed.

“The global seed vault is an unknowable, imaginary, yet real proposition that’s caught up in imagining a future to which we have no access.” The connection between the vault and the energetic nature of homeopathy is explored in Mitchell’s letter to the Seed Vault Coordinator.  He writes, “Homeopathy believes that the less present something is, the more affective it is… Given Svalbard is ostensibly a liquid world covered and shaped by water and ice, what diluted memories must it hold?”

Mitchell has been using letters in his practice since he was at art school. His experience with professionals whose expertise he has sought has been positive. “When you approach someone openly, honestly and with level of inquiry about what it is that they do, or the knowledge they hold that I’m interested in thinking into, subverting, turning it upside down, or looking at it a new way, there’s often a really strong reciprocity that occurs. The work results from that engagement.”

This month, another exhibition, called Archive of Dust, opens at Melbourne’s Hayden’s Gallery, examining the Parthenon marbles held at the British Museum. Like Svalbard’s polar bears, the kernels in Mitchell’s work tend to “den in, burying themselves in your mind”, along with an implied position that opens toward an alternative understandings and imponderable futures.

Dane Mitchell: The Imponderables
The Renshaws
29 November—1 March

Dane Mitchell: Archive of Dust
Hayden’s Gallery
7 February—8 March