Dane Mitchell

The sperm whale embodies a tragic duality in human history — a highly intelligent being treated as terrain. Possessing the largest brains of any known species, sperm whales became sentient landscapes to be mined for their resources. Nineteenth-century whalers even adopted mining terminology, referring to whale migration routes as ‘veins’, an unsettling parallel to how we describe geological deposits of extracted materials.

 

The same word ‘vein’ describes both life-sustaining blood vessels and extractable resources. Just as miners speak of ‘hitting a vein’ of gold or oil, whalers viewed these sentient beings as floating repositories of valuable raw materials within a liquid landscape. Their bodies were systematically harvested for an astounding range of commercial products: candles and lamp oil to illuminate homes and city streets, lubricants for machines, ingredients for soaps and cosmetics, materials for waterproofing, and rust prevention, even umbrellas, pencils, typewriter ribbons, and medicines.

 

The sperm whale’s transformation from living creatures into industrial resource represents one of humanity's most profound acts of reframing nature as commodity.

 

Ambergris (Capture and Dispersal) features two motorised tripods commonly used to install air-conditioning units. Each tripod holds and disperses two variants of ambergris — a fragrance ingredient found in sperm whale vomit. Ambergris is a rare substance produced in the digestive system of the sperm whale and eventually expelled to float on ocean surfaces. It remains the only sperm whale product still legally traded as it is a waste product. Its value as a fragrance ingredient spans centuries and continues today, with trained dogs scanning beaches worldwide for these digestive materials.

 

One tripod supports an upturned glass funnel typically used in distillation processes and here contains genuine ambergris. A specialised Solid Phase Microextraction fibre needle captures the natural scent compounds rising from the ambergris – its ‘headspace’. These captured compounds are then used to create synthetic replicas in a laboratory.

 

The other tripod holds an industrial atomiser, commonly used in airports and hotels to ‘tone’ the air and to build specific scent experiences for the purpose of driving capitalist memory triggers and to deodorise space. The atomiser here releases a synthetic copy of a laboratory-synthesised ambergris fragrance created through the fermentation of carbohydrates by microorganisms. When released by the atomiser the fragrance intermingles with the projected light of nearby artworks and disperses in the gallery environment.

 

The story of ambergris blurs the line between natural and artificial as well as the ancient and the modern. While we can now synthesise its scent in laboratories (as in this artwork), wild ambergris still washes up on shores as it has for millennia. Yet even this ‘natural’ substance is no longer purely natural — modern sperm whales have become living repositories of industrial pollutants, accumulating toxins throughout their lives to such an extent that scientists now classify them as ‘sentient toxic events’.

 

Ambergris (Capture and Dispersal) reveals a truth: both the synthetic fragrance and the whale itself are products of late capitalism embodying the increasingly impossible separation of natural and artificial worlds.