Dane Mitchell deals in the invisible and elusive; things lost, replaced and forgotten. Here, the label for an empty museum mount identifies the missing specimen as a species of extinct bird that lived in Te Waipounamu, the South Island, approximately 33 to 23 million years ago. Its existence was established in 1946 by a British zoologist from a fossilised fragment of wishbone he found in north Otago. Researchers have speculated that it was an early albatross or a prehistoric ‘false-toothed’ seabird, but very little is known for certain. Accordingly, its scientific name is conspicuously unspecific: Manu means ‘bird’ in te reo Māori, and antiquus is Latin for ‘old’ or ‘ancient’. Mitchell’s slight, spare mount emphasises this perilous hold on history, as humans teeter at the edge of an age of mass extinctions.

(Absence, May 2023)

A bail amphora was a storage vessel used in ancient Greece and Italy for oil, wine, milk or grain, and sometimes for marking graves or as funerary vessels. The decoration is recognised as the work of an unidentified but prolific artist in Southern Italy, referred to as the ‘Apulianizing Painter’ for helping introduce contemporary styles and motifs from Apulia into the Campania region.

(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)