by Amelia Birch.

Full disclosure: I’ve lately been wrecked by writer’s block. Fortunately, it seemed a Perth Festival exhibition hosted by Fremantle Arts Centre could offer an antidote. Queenslander Kate Mitchell is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores ideas relating to productivity, social connection, and magical thinking. Her latest show, titled Idea Induction, was reportedly ‘designed to spark the flow of ideas,’ a compelling premise and on the personal level, I hoped a timely intervention to my own creative block.
        Idea Induction consists of five works. At the centre of the room should have been what Mitchell refers to as a “singing chair”. Unfortunately, the chair itself was missing on my visit, seemingly only installed when Mitchell herself is present to facilitate. In this piece the subject sits on a monochord throne, and Mitchell perches behind and strums on the back of the chair to transport her subject to ‘a liminal space where ideas, intuition, and insight naturally arise.’ In the absence of the singing chair was Prompts for Idea Induction, a series of beanbags and some headphones facing a video work that took up the entirety of a wall. Across a trippy watercolour background, a total of fifty phrases swung metronomically back and forth, one at a time, like a hypnotic powerpoint presentation. One of the first snatches of text that rippled, all caps, before me said: ‘SET INTENTIONS.’ Willing myself to go along with it, I thought about breaking my writer’s block. ‘BAKE A CAKE,’ the screen suggested inanely. ‘EAT DATES.’ ‘HUM.’ It was hardly groundbreaking stuff, but I stayed seated for all fifty(!), totalling a whopping 38 minutes in the beanbag, and over that period I oscillated wildly between irritation and sheer bliss. There is something extremely healing about engaging in a work that is so earnestly, perfectly cringe. Broadly speaking, Idea Induction draws parallels between the process of giving birth to a child and the “birthing” of ideas via the creative process. The point is laboured and kitschy, never quite managing to transcend the purely literal, something one might expect from an exhibition about the process of creating something novel.
        In Things Observed In The Space Between Two Full Moons, thirty sequential images stretch across the gallery wall. There is a charming nostalgia to these prints, more like children’s flashcards than tarot. A dead duck, a hobby horse, and a laundry basket are rendered in suburban browns and mauves. Though simple, the methodical patchwork and the silence of the image is the closest the viewer gets to a meditative experience in the exhibition’s entirety. But the work, and such meditative reverie, is burdened by the sheer weight of textual lore. Things Observed comes with an accompanying thirty-line poem on a nearby piece of paper. The poem translates the images one by one in the obsolete spirit of a decodable reader. Things Observed already has a three-paragraph explanatory text, so is the poem necessary to tell us exactly what each image “means”? Herein lies the biggest pitfall of the exhibition: a reductive obsession with text to the point of suffocation. Any attempt to focus on the visuals of Things Observed feels burdened by the simultaneous consumption of some kind of directive text. To one’s right, the twee soft sculpture of Patch Ups looking extremely Etsy circa 2014 spelled out thrilling words like ‘MAGIC’ and ‘VISION,’ while Prompts for Idea Induction to the left shouts in caps that you ‘WATCH TV’ or ‘GET A MASSAGE.’ It’s a relentless visual bombardment that has more in common with the doom-scrolling phenomena of “two-screen viewing” than any purportedly meditative effect of Mitchell’s ideology. Ultimately, the work lacks the conviction to exist visually without extensive exposition. More frustrating than the relentless affirmations is the impossibility for the work to speak for itself.
        In the small alcove beside the exhibition there is a video of Mitchell strumming on the chair while a visitor sits enraptured. There is also yet another pamphlet to take, bearing a full page of additional instructions. ‘Carry a notebook and pen around with you,’ the pamphlet instructed me. ‘Reflect in the evening. Start your day with a declaration. Embrace the perspective of shoes.’ I longed for illiteracy. These weren’t even as fun as the ‘EAT DATES’ directives of the previous room. These reams of accompanying lore in all their shallowness seemed an attempt to compensate for the theoretical weakness of the art. Mitchell’s pieces even felt out of date by the current resurgence of woo, a Kikki K-ification of commercial affirmations rather than anything particularly intuitive or transgressive. That Idea Induction made it into the 2025 Perth Festival catalogue is truly fascinating. But perhaps I would have felt differently if I’d sat in the strumming chair.

However, as you can see, it did ease my writer’s block.


Kate Mitchell’s Idea Induction is on display at the Fremantle Arts Centre, and runs 8 February – 20 April 2025.

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Image credits: 
1. Installation photograph of Kate Mitchell’s Idea Induction is on display at the Fremantle Arts Centre.
2. Kate Mitchell, Study for Idea Induction (Highway Driving), 2024, image courtesy the artist.