This week we had our first meeting with our research paper tutor. I’m with Maiko Tsutsumi, together with Dee, Eliza, Holly and LingLi.
I’m very excited to work with Maiko, I loved her work in London and I admire her ability to transform raw materials into art in the most essential and poetic way.
What marked me the most in her exhibition was the presence of space, invisible yet large, and the rose spike sculpture. Powerful and fragile.
I look forward to further exchanges with her on the subject of my research (and my work).
Her artistic sensitivity and her cultural background could really make the difference in this research.
I told the group about my ideas for the research paper, about Olfactory Art, and what role does the sense of smell play into the aesthetic experience.
When I started looking into this topic I naively didn’t realise how vast and incredibly interesting it was.
I talked about the things that intrigued me the most in my readings:
- How smell directly involves the areas of the brain where we process memories and emotions. Therefore it’s a sense that speaks the language of unconscious. I find a link with my practice in visualising the invisible layers of reality. If what we call reality is the product of our subjective projections, then smell could actually allow us to visualise unconscious, invisible, unknown layers of reality (and of ourselves).
- Links to our personal unconscious but also collective unconscious (universal smells – such as incense – interpreted in different ways by different cultures).
- History of smell in art – this sense has been ignored for centuries, and artists started to look into it in the early 1900s’. Why?
- Philosophy – since Plato and Aristotle smell has been seen as an impure and vile sense. This is a very binary view of the human nature and the perception of art (divides man into body and spirit). For centuries sight and hearing have been elevated to the level of the art because they speak to the spirit/mind. On the contrary, smell, taste and touch remind us of our physical nature (Nietzche), the body, our expiration, decay. They cannot be vehicule of art.
- Smell as expression and protest. During the 60s some feminist artists started working with scent to redefine the feminine identity. Up to that point the female body had been objectified by the male gaze (artists or otherwise). They use scent to reinterpret the feminine body.
- How smell can influence the other senses. Crossovers with sight: Julie Foret – La Chasse
I blabbed enthusiastically for a good 20 minutes. I have to research deeper and narrow down my focus. What I described is material for about 6 or 7 research papers! What is the question I’m more interested to answer? Maiko said that sometime it works to start from imagining a solution and then do reverse engineering back to the question. I like the perspective.
- Research how smell has been used by other artists
- Research how smell is valued in different cultures (West and East have a very different position on the subject)
- How would this research inspire/impact my practice?
Maiko suggested to look at other research papers and especially at the abstract, to try and identify the core of my research.
I don’t know how I am going to do that in a week and write it in a thousand words…! I think I will create a mind map first and then structure the text in bullet points, to try and identify the links and flow of the narration. However this goes, I’m feeling energised by the new things I already discovered on this topic, that’s been teasing me for a while now.
I am curious to see how this will affect my practice, given the potential distance from my medium/ practice. This is an opportunity to explore mixed media and installation, as well as to start experimenting with hybrid languages or, in this case, hybrid senses. How will the theory affect my practice? How will the work of other artists contribute to my artistic growth (technical and conceptual)? How might theories and studies on this matter inspire my art and my way of thinking/perceiving/looking/smelling?
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