2023
Avoin Kasvihuone, Helsinki
An installation with 4 scented cloths & unpaired earrings.
1. Cigarette smoke, lard, small coins, lit matches and sparklers, beeswax, tung oil, onion, L’oréal Paris Elnett hairspray, lipliner shavings.
2. & 3. Frying oil (with chicken residue), coconut and vanilla essence.
4. Steamed, rotted sugar melon, strawberry essence, perfume Loveliness La Passione.
In 1902, an American artist Sadakichi Hartmann presented the public with a work called ‘Perfume Concert – A Trip to Japan’. In the work, industrial fans swept air through large, perfume-drenched cheese cloths into an auditorium hall, in an attempt to create an orchestrated, narrative experience through changing smellscapes.
At its time, the piece was poorly received, in part because of inapt circumstances, such as the loud, cigarette smoke-filled auditorium. Also, the audience’s associations with scents that Hartmann used to illustrate an imaginary trip to Japan, varied significantly, evoking a vast imagery of subjective memories.
In Handbag, I have applied Hartmann’s method of drenching cloths with different scent materials, with an aim to create a memory-based, carried-by-the-wind smellscape of a person and her belongings. Reading about Hartmann’s piece and its receiving, I have thought about the way mundane experiences and sensations are always tangled in a messy, emotional knot of simultaneous and contradicting events.
Avoin Kasvihuone, Helsinki
An installation with 4 scented cloths & unpaired earrings.
1. Cigarette smoke, lard, small coins, lit matches and sparklers, beeswax, tung oil, onion, L’oréal Paris Elnett hairspray, lipliner shavings.
2. & 3. Frying oil (with chicken residue), coconut and vanilla essence.
4. Steamed, rotted sugar melon, strawberry essence, perfume Loveliness La Passione.
In 1902, an American artist Sadakichi Hartmann presented the public with a work called ‘Perfume Concert – A Trip to Japan’. In the work, industrial fans swept air through large, perfume-drenched cheese cloths into an auditorium hall, in an attempt to create an orchestrated, narrative experience through changing smellscapes.
At its time, the piece was poorly received, in part because of inapt circumstances, such as the loud, cigarette smoke-filled auditorium. Also, the audience’s associations with scents that Hartmann used to illustrate an imaginary trip to Japan, varied significantly, evoking a vast imagery of subjective memories.
In Handbag, I have applied Hartmann’s method of drenching cloths with different scent materials, with an aim to create a memory-based, carried-by-the-wind smellscape of a person and her belongings. Reading about Hartmann’s piece and its receiving, I have thought about the way mundane experiences and sensations are always tangled in a messy, emotional knot of simultaneous and contradicting events.
