Headspace, Letter to Sea World, 2024 & Polar Bear Zoo Enclosure Air Sample, 2024

These paired artworks comprise a photographic print of a letter to Sea World's Polar Bear Supervisor and a two-can canister containing a headspace air sample captured from within their polar bear enclosure. The works investigate containment strategies across institutional forms—zoos, museums, galleries—revealing how enclosure operates as both physical and psychological territory. The letter artwork functions as performative documentation, employing formal correspondence to negotiate access while critically examining the "correlation between the development of the museum out of the wunderkammer and the zoo out of the menagerie." My request to "ensnare the aromascape" through headspace technology positions scent molecules as artistic medium, proposing that volatile compounds can "summon up experiences and reveal worlds" when vapourised in gallery spaces. The air sample canister materialises this proposition, containing actual atmospheric traces from the manufactured Arctic habitat housing Nelson, Hudson, and Mishka—Australia's only captive polar bears. Through gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis, these molecular traces become reproducible synthetic compounds, enabling the polar bear enclosure to "take shape in the brain as it hits the olfactory sensory neurons." This analysis will be a future outcome. These methodologies reveals how containment operates bidirectionally: while polar bears are enclosed within fabricated Svalbard landscapes, humans in actual Svalbard carry polar bears "in the enclosure of [their] mind", legally required to remain alert for encounters. The artworks generate new knowledge about institutional containment by demonstrating how olfactory capture can transpose one enclosure (zoo) into another (gallery), affecting audiences through invisible molecular presence that bypasses visual representation to directly engage embodied memory and spatial cognition.<p></p>