Scents of Self
First shown at Desire and Alchemy, a two artists’ exhibition by Emilia Telese and Michael Borkowsky
19 October – 19 November 2018
PREVIEW
Friday 19th October | 7.30pm – 9.30pm
Exhibition Open
Saturday 20th October | 2pm – 4pm
Sunday 21st October | 2pm – 4pm
Monday 22nd October | 11am – 2pm
Saturday 27th October | 2pm – 4pm
Sunday 28th October | 2pm – 4pm
Monday 29th October | 11am – 2pm
Exhibition Remains Open By Appointment until
Monday 19th November
Lunchtime Conversation: Michael Borkowsky and (via Skype) Emilia Telese
Monday 5th November
Scents of Self is a new immersive, site specific installation by Emilia Telese exploring pattern, body style and the sense of smell.
The work is designed to envelop the exhibition space with a sensory overload. It has a strong exploratory aspect, where the viewer is completely surrounded and can walk on, touch and scratch the artwork to reveal a secret number of scents specially made for it in collaboration with Amsterdam perfumer Spyros Drosopoulos. The scents have been developed to work with the visual and site specific elements in order to generate different reactions.
The piece is the fruit of over ten years of Telese’s research into how we associate smell with visuals, environments and our own life; it is the first of her works incorporating scent. Different ways of communicating through the body and its external incarnations are linked with how these interact with scents generated by our skin, our surrounding environment, the chemicals we use every day and the food we eat.
Scents of Self relates to Emilia Telese’s ongoing conversations with Ted Polhemus’ “Supermarket of Style” theory and her long-standing identification with the concept of gesamtkunstwerk – total art, incorporating as many of life’s manifestations as possible within the realm of Art.
More About Scents of Self
Scents of Self develops my artistic research on body image and communication, sensory awareness and my ongoing identification with Total Art – Gesamtkunstwerk, a way of conceiving all manifestations of life within the reach and realm of Art.
In Scents of Self, I performatively created five “visions” of myself as different facets of my character relating to specific messages expressed through clothing, somatic language and the sense of smell, and developed them visually with the view of a sensory overload for the viewer. I then manipulated these visions to form patterns, surfaces and motifs working in unison. I conceived a “scratch and sniff” surface which reacts to touch.
Visitors are invited to touch, scratch, walk on and search the irregular surface of the artwork on the gallery walls and floor, revealing a number of scents developed for the artwork by perfumer Spyros Drosopulos of experimental perfume house Baruti. For Scents of Self, Spyros created compositions which give the feeling of a never-ending kaleidoscope of sensations from the feminine to the earthy, colourful and oriental playing on the idea of “never enough”.
The scent under the surface of the artwork lingers on the viewer’s fingers and feet and is made to elicit sensations that relate to the images present in the space. As opposed to the inherently sacred surface of artworks, I wanted a piece that could be defaced and disintegrated over time and generate a very real lasting trace on the bodies of those experiencing it.
For the past decade of my art practice, I have sought a way of involving all senses in the making and experiencing of art. My interest in the sense of smell within art started when I created Four Senses, a participatory artwork at Artsway, New Forest, for the 2010 Cultural Olympiad. In the work, visitors were blindfolded and invited to experience the forest through sounds, smells and textures. During my search for multi-sensorial art I became a keen collector of vintage and unusual perfumes, and shared Luca Turin’s theory that perfume is the most portable form of art. I then started to develop ideas that would unite visual and other sensorial elements to form an immersive environment.
For the past decade of my art practice, I have sought a way of involving all senses in the making and experiencing of art. My interest in the sense of smell within art started when I created Four Senses, a participatory artwork at Artsway, New Forest, for the 2010 Cultural Olympiad. In the work, visitors were blindfolded and invited to experience the forest through sounds, smells and textures. During my search for multi-sensorial art I became a keen collector of vintage and unusual perfumes, and shared Luca Turin’s theory that perfume is the most portable form of art. I then started to develop ideas that would unite visual and other sensorial elements to form an immersive environment.
Philosophically, Scents of Self relates to the post-modern idea of the Supermarket of Style, first theorised by American/British anthropologist and friend Ted Polhemus.
I sought to create communication through clothing and visual style in a post-modern key where all ages and all inspirations converge and converse to create looks that are not ascribable to a particular era but play with fashion as a post-subcultural language which doesn’t have a tense but where all meanings are jumbled up in an eternal Now, as Polhemus theorises in his book Body Styles.
In this sense, the installation further develops my practice exploring the way we communicate through our appearance, the portrayal of women in the arts and media, and the iconography of style.
The work has a strong body image connotation, which has been an ongoing interest of mine since I created Perfect Ten, a performance installation for Paranoia at Leeds City Gallery in 2006 and the Centro Cultural Telemar in Buenos Aires. Perfect 10 was then part of the early body-positive movement, being shown at the Endangered Species world summit at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 2010, and subsequently in New York and Rio de Janeiro.
A more intimate environment was needed for Scents of Self: for through going into the recesses of our perception and memories of places, smells, times and styles, we discover our most ancestral, sensorial self.
The hidden nature of the space lends itself to a secret, almost furtive exploration, yet the scale of the work is thought as an explosion of colour, pattern and scent.
Emilia Telese, October 2018
About Desire and Alchemy
In Spring 2018 Michael Borkowsky and I, through a mutual interest in olfactory – related artwork, planned a joint exhibition which would see our individual practices shown in a two artists exhibition. A long discourse ensued over a period of a year. This is how Desire and Alchemy came into being.
The exhibition is designed to join our practices by exhibiting them side by side. Naturally different, our works explore in a parallel way our conversation about scent and seeks to generate new, unexplored sights and sensations.
Our jointly created perfume tryptich, Past Present, Future is the visual and olfactory bridge that complements our individual pieces.
Credits
I would like to thank the following people:
Spyros Drosopulos at Baruti
Bruce Davies at Basement Art Projects
Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson, Richard Shields and Peter McAdam: technical support
Jane Tesseyman at EST Display Ltd Leeds
Jadene Imbusch – Gallery volunteer
