Scents
Scent, Memory and Place
Smell may be one of my earliest memories.
When I was born, I was told that rather than immediately going to my mother’s breast, I wriggled my way upwards towards her neck. I nestled into the space beneath her hair and breathed her in.
It became something I continued to do throughout my childhood. In my family, we called it “snuffing.” I would snuff the people I loved, their hair, their necks, that particular place just behind the ear where someone seems to smell most distinctly like themselves.
My father travelled frequently for business. When he returned, I would lie along the back of the sofa behind him, close to his head, while he told me stories about where he had been. He always brought me home crystals and stones from his travels, and over the years they became a collection: small physical pieces of distant places.
But I remember his scent too.
There was something about the combination of those things, the smell of someone I loved, stories of another country, and an object carried home from it, that made distant places real to me. Long before I thought consciously about atmosphere, I understood that a place could be carried home with you.
I have another memory of my mother going out for dinner with my father when I was a child. When they returned, she would come into my bedroom to kiss me goodnight. I remember the cool, crisp smell of the outside air still clinging to her, mingled with perfume and the familiar smell of her skin and hair. It was glamorous and comforting at once: the mysterious adult world outside my bedroom arriving for a moment at my bedside.
Perhaps this is why scent has always felt inseparable from intimacy to me.
The smell of a baby’s head. The warm, slightly musky smell of someone you love. Burying your face into the fur of a beloved dog. The smell behind someone’s ear. These are scents that cannot really be experienced from a distance. To know them, you have to come close.
Even now, I often smell my own hair. It is comforting to me. Perhaps it is partly sensory or a form of self-soothing, but I think there is something else in it too. My own scent reminds me of myself. It reminds me of home.
The Scent of a Room
Rooms hold scent in much the same way that they hold light, sound and traces of the people who have occupied them.
A particular combination of wood, fabric, flowers, smoke, cooking, old books, damp stone or perfume can remain buried somewhere in the mind for years. Then one unexpected encounter with that smell can resurrect an entire place.
You don’t simply remember it.
For a moment, you are there.
This relationship between scent and memory has become increasingly important to my work because I am interested in creating worlds rather than isolated images. Painting gives me the visual world. Music gives it sound. Scent gives it an atmosphere that can enter the body almost before the conscious mind has understood what it is experiencing.
Incense
My Catholic faith has given scent another meaning.
Incense has accompanied prayer for centuries. It rises visibly through a church, filling its architecture with something that cannot be held. I love leaving Mass and discovering later that the incense is still caught in my hair or clothing.
I have left the church, but some physical trace of the church has come home with me.
There is something profound to me about that.
Scent occupies a strange territory between the material and the immaterial. We cannot see it, and we cannot keep it, yet it can transform a room. It can attach itself to a body. It can disappear and return decades later carrying a memory intact.
This is how I want scent to exist within my work.
The interiors I create are imagined as complete sensory spaces. They have their own light and objects, their own music, and increasingly, their own scent. Each element belongs to the same world.
For me, scent is not decoration added afterwards. It is another form of storytelling, another way of constructing an interior.
Perhaps that began with my mother’s neck, before I could speak or understand what memory was.
A lifetime later, I am still trying to capture the same thing:
the invisible atmosphere that makes a person, a room, or a moment feel like home.
SCENTS
COMING SOON
A curated collection of scent, incense and olfactory objects that inhabit the world around my work.