A large steel apparatus occupies the space, yet simultaneously points to – and supports – an absence whose origins lie in the "object mount" or "museum mount" used to hold a mammoth. Lacuna supports the invisible contours of an unrendered, missing entity and, in many respects, holds aloft the elephant in the room.

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Presented as part of Secrets and Lies – Scape 2020, Christchurch Ōtautahi, Aotearoa New Zealand.

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In Lacuna, Dane Mitchell continues to explore ideas of absence, disappearance and obsolescence that have become central to his practice over the last two decades. Mitchell works to make the intangible tangible and the invisible visible, telling stories that illuminate blind spots in our collective memory. His work tests the limits of our institutions and the Enlightenment values they were built on, often looking beyond what can be measured or defined to the poetics of the infinitesimal and the inexplicable.

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Mitchell's projects are not intended as wholehearted critique; there is, in fact, an underlying interest in and homage to the precision and rigour of the work undertaken by experts of all kinds. It is at this intersection of imagination, highly refined craft and museology that Lacuna exists.

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Referring to a gap or missing part, "lacuna" also describes a process of critical thinking in which gaps can be logically filled by understanding what comes before and after. A giant steel apparatus occupies the space, yet it also signifies an absence: it is both sculpture and support structure, whose origins lie in the "object mount" used to hold a mammoth. It is chimerical – holding and fusing with the invisible contours of an unrendered, missing entity.

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The object mount is one of museology's most self-effacing inventions – designed to disappear, to direct attention entirely toward the thing it holds. In Lacuna, this logic is inverted: the mount remains while the object it was built for is gone, and what was meant to be invisible becomes the work itself. The support structure, stripped of its purpose, becomes unexpectedly monumental.

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The mammoth is not an arbitrary absence. As a creature of deep geological time, of ice and extinction and spectacularly failed revival, it carries its own freight of loss – scientific, ecological, imaginative. To hold the shape of a mammoth in steel, in a city already acquainted with sudden and catastrophic loss, is to place one kind of disappearance in quiet conversation with another.

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In relation to SCAPE Public Art Season 2020: Secrets and Lies, Lacuna brings the back of the museum – the store, the workshop, the things we are not usually privy to – into the foreground. It suggests that the front-facing work of the museum, which creates environments and manipulates material in order to convince audiences of a particular point of view, is built on the shifting and subjective values and beliefs of the people who occupy it – and that, like its cousins the art gallery and the library, it is an open book rather than a concrete monolith.

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Situated in the former engineering school of the University of Canterbury – which later became the pre-earthquake Court Theatre – Lacuna and its environment are surveilled and transmitted into the Canterbury Museum, creating a closed museological feedback loop through which visitors inside the museum can look out into other, more uncertain spaces.