Respiratory Event (Vapor Whale) is a literal attempt to vaporise a sperm whale – dissipating the fragrance of the whale across the cityscape from a rooftop.

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From formal air-duct-like vents, a hybridised aroma made by the artist is vaporised continuously throughout the exhibition. The fragrance combines synthetic ambergris with natural ambergris produced in the belly of a sperm whale.

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Ambergris has one of the strangest material histories of any substance used in art or perfumery – a waxy secretion formed over decades in the digestive tract of the sperm whale, expelled into the ocean and transformed by salt water and sunlight into something that smells, paradoxically, of the sea and of sweetness. It has been coveted for centuries, used in perfume, medicine and food, and is now replicated synthetically at industrial scale. That Mitchell works with both forms simultaneously – the natural and its copy, the original and its surrogate – is entirely consistent with a practice long preoccupied with authenticity, reproduction and the uncanny persistence of things that are on the brink of disappearance.

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Alongside the two petroleum-coloured air ducts rests a replica life-size sperm whale skull – still in its transportation crate – produced in mainland China by a company specialising in replica skeletons for museum displays.

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The work reveals a bleak truth: the distance between the synthetic and the natural is collapsing. Whales have become "sentient toxic events" – declared as such due to the exorbitant quantity of pollutants they accumulate over a lifetime. In this sense, the replica and the whale alike are creatures of late capitalism – and, like the fragrance itself, entangle our synthetic and natural worlds.​ The fragrance is diluted in perfumer's alcohol, and the compound includes synthetics used in perfumery to recreate the waxy, fatty qualities of natural ambergris.

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There is something quietly vertiginous about the work's rooftop location – the fragrance of a creature that lives at the furthest reaches of the ocean, released into urban air, inhaled by pedestrians who may not know what they are breathing. The city becomes, momentarily, an ocean floor; the commuter, an unwitting deep-sea diver. Respiratory Event (Vapor Whale) asks what it means to share air with something so vast, so remote, and so endangered.​