His upcoming exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery involves materials such as perfume, glass and even magic spells.
Some members of the public may feel they are being tricked by contemporary art, he admits, but denies he's trying to trick anyone.
"If there is a trick, it's happening inside the art. It's not something that's a trick on people. I think it's a shame people feel that way," he says.
A couple of years ago, controversy blew up over his winning the $15,000 2009 Waikato National Contemporary Art Award with a work constructed by curators from the packaging of other artists' entries according to his detailed instructions. He was in Berlin at the time on a year-long Berliner Künstlerprogramm residency and did not see the finished work.
"Maybe there's a certain idea of work ethic that people hold dear," he says, but points out that art created by other people from artists' instructions has a long history, as does using found objects.
Back in New Zealand for three residencies before returning to Berlin, the 34-year-old Auckland artist is creating three linked exhibitions.
"Radiant Matter Part I" opened at the Govett Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth on March 5. "Radiant Matter Part II" opens at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery on May 28 and Part III at Art Space in Auckland on July 2. A joint publication from the three galleries will follow.
Each show involves common materials and conceptual links, and each contains a perfume and a lot of glass, he says.
"I'm very interested in glass, in that it's a material that's both solid and liquid simultaneously. It can be thought about as a material and a container. I like that it has a lot of scope."
Some of the glass objects were formed by Mitchell repeating the names of his ancestors into a glass-blowing tube, so enclosing and encapsulating the words in the glass. Others were formed by attaching the glass-blowing tube to bagpipes while the piper was playing funeral laments and marches.
Perfume has become one of his trademarks in recent years. Smells can also conjure a past viscerally, as the sense of smell is interlinked with long-term memory, he says.
"The interesting thing to me about perfume is that it has a form. I'm interested in thinking about it as a material and how it works sculpturally. In some ways we can think about perfume as a shattered object that is molecular in scale, but it's a sculpture that enters the brain, so when you smell something, actual molecules from that object are entering the receptors in the olfactory bulb."
While in Berlin, he started working with Michel Roudnitska, a perfumer in the south of France. The first perfume they made, the smell of an empty room, was presented in an exhibition in Berlin.
The perfume to be featured in Dunedin is called Epitaph.
Mitchell describes it as the smell of when you are alone in a house but you feel as if someone else is present. It has a ghostly effect with bodily notes of civet and musk but a dry, dusty finish.
It also reflects the idea of a museum, thinking about ghosts, dust and the past.
The perfume will be presented in an old-fashioned glass display case with a hole cut in one side. The scent will be sprayed daily so it can be smelt emanating from the case or viewers can put their nose in and smell it, he says.
However, the most physically present and yet invisible piece will be a spell cast by a local witch during the installation period. It will be the opening up of a gateway to the etheric realm, he says.
Besides containing remnants of materials the witch uses, such as salt, the area will be cordoned off with a metal-frame sculpture that suggests various planes, he says.
"I've worked with witches previously, and with shamans in other parts of the world, and again this is an exploration of the possibilities of the unseen and of other ways of knowing, of understanding space, both physical and temporal."
Mitchell has been accused of playing the trick of the emperor's new clothes - a tale by Hans Christian Andersen in which a couple of tricksters claim to weave new clothes for the emperor, which they say are invisible to the incompetent and stupid. Everyone, including the emperor, not wishing to appear stupid, pretends to see them, until a child blurts out that the emperor isn't wearing anything at all.
"I see that as a cynical point of view, but I think also what the work asks you to do is to suspend your belief or disbelief. When I make these works, I'm not making them cynically. Mine is a position of open possibility to these realms," he says.
"The interesting thing with these works is that people come at them from all kinds of angles so that's really exciting to me.
People might feel affronted, people might feel really engaged, people might feel ripped off, people might try to feel for something, people might back off from something. All these reactions are lively and valid."
Initially Mitchell started working with witchcraft from the point of view of art and intellectualising space, he says.
"I felt intellectually distant from it, but of course once you start making that work you can't be. You feel very much embedded in it. I don't practise it myself but I'm interested in its possibility and in ritual.
"I guess, in some ways, the making of the work is an exploration, a kind of testing of my own boundaries, pushing myself up against these things to see where I sit in relation to these things."
He chose to use the spell in the Dunedin exhibition because when working with witches or shamans in the past he was asked to call on his ancestors to activate the spells and several of his ancestors on his father's side are buried at St Bathans, and the Southern and Andersons Bay cemeteries.
They came to Dunedin from Dumfries in the 1860s, he says.
A video clip of casting the spell, from the surveillance cameras, and one of the bagpipes blowing glass may be on display outside the exhibition, he says. He also includes in the exhibition a large piece of obsidian - black volcanic glass - from Mayor Island in the Bay of Plenty.
One side is polished and will reflect the whole show like a scrying glass or a Claude mirror, used by painters in the past to enhance shadow and light in a reflected scene they were painting.
"I'm interested in this binary of concealment and revelation, and in some way the work gains some agency in not revealing its whole story," he says.
" I think there's a lot of scope and energy in that possibility."
