Writing

Making Scents/Sense Written by David Khan

Tūrei 16 Hūrae

Tuesday 16 July

2024

Upon entering Jo Burzynska’s Osmologies exhibition opening at Blue Oyster, I’m momentarily nonplussed. I’m expecting to catch a whiff of something but there is no sudden smelly onslaught; no pungent assault. One does register an olfactory transition between the stony asphalt chill and car exhaust fumes of Dowling Street, and the warmer aromas of the gallery space, with the scents of people and clothing blending with the understated mustiness of wooden floors, faint tangs of paint and printer paper, and yes, a subtle lacing of other flavours. Is that the clinical astringency of hospital antiseptic? Did I just inhale a wisp of spice? Is that a plume of pine needles? Something fruity; something floral? Earthy? Smoky? Oh! And what’s that? A dash of something funky, like old rubber, excrement, or a neglected sack of refuse. Ah, it’s gone—just a fleeting niff curling back into an attenuated redolence. Did I even smell it at all? Now someone is asking me a question. Yes, I’ll take a glass of wine. Something to sip as I perambulate. Sipping, scenting, sounding, sighting.

 

Charting an uncertain course through a mishmash medley of sensations. First stop, Nyal: a hollowed-out hue (gourd) tied in gold ribbon hanging in the street-front window. Ah ha! The source of the pine and antiseptic—and other scents as well: moss, musk, smoke, lanolin. Adjacent to the gallery entranceway and gently swaying on strings attached to the ceiling, I encounter Hannah, a pair of incongruously suspended pillows in the company of a dangling oxygen mask. The pillows invite further inspection. Getting up close and personal (as all these works demand), I experience a jolt of recognition. Is that not Old Spice aftershave? Gingerly, I approach the pendent oxygen mask and, sure enough, accompanying the clinical waft of hand cleanser, something nasty lurks: a fug of armpit, shit, and latex—repellent, yet also exerting a disturbing fascination.

 

Mounted further along the wall is Erin, a pink, 3D-printed, ‘Scratch n Sniff’ olfactory cassette. Of all the works exhibited, Erin is the piece that most unambiguously demands tactile interaction: it’s not enough to sniff closely—one must actually disturb the surfaces of the patches on the scented ‘mixtape’, thereby releasing a farrago of flavours ranging from deodorant and sweaty sneakers to lavender and baby oil. Lurching away from the wall into the centre of the front gallery space, I nose up to Nico: a trio of brightly coloured, upturned bamboo bowls, two of which trail mobiles of cinnamon bark, dried chillis, makrut lime leaves, star anise and other items. I detect subtle notes of spice and smoke, citrus and cloves. Getting into the swing of things now, I turn to the final olfactory work in the front gallery, Hama: a diminutive harakeke kete dangling above the floor near the rear wall. Bending over this handwoven pouch, I breathe in a melange of land and sea—scents herbaceous, ligneous and yeasty blending with accents of brine and fish.

 

But there’s more. Around the corner to the left, in the smaller rear gallery space, I sniff out Charlie, a mini-installation comprising a looming spectre in the form of a white cotton sheet draped over a wire frame and a whited-out Snoopy toy hanging face-down from the ceiling in the company of a pair of clear plastic baubles, partially filled with liquid. Strategically emplaced along the rear gallery walls are four ‘occluded vitrines’ that are among Burzynska’s most witty and yet enigmatic creations: repurposed tissue boxes, blanked out with white paint, their front faces perforated with dark, mute, oval mouths. The draped phantom emits a slight reek of pee and cabbage, Snoopy issues homely smells of milk and washing, and the vitrines vent various odours: roast meat, woodsmoke, furniture polish and, perhaps most striking, a sinus shock of toothpaste, bracing the nose and lingering on the palate. 

 

Nyal, Hannah, Erin, Nico, Hama, Charlie: these titles, in conjunction with the brief but candid testimonials given in the Osmologies exhibition pamphlet, signal Burzynska’s invitation for gallery visitors to experience ‘memories blended within … olfactory compositions’ that function, thereby, as ‘olfactory “portraits”’.1 This documentation, in conjunction with the artist’s responses to questions about her creative process, reveals to what degree the Osmologies works cultivate inclusiveness, dialogue and collaboration whilst, at the same time, courting chance and embracing improvisation. Thus, via face-to-face interviews (and, for one participant, an online questionnaire), the artist solicited responses from people representing a ‘range of ethnic, sensory, gender and neurodiverse backgrounds’, asking them to reflect on memories with specifically olfactory associations.2 These reminiscences provided the requisite sensory coordinates defining Burzynska’s olfactory compositions, the precise formulation of which involved blending various essential oils (upwards of twenty in some cases, in widely differing proportions) in order to generate the aromas charging the scented components of the subsequent works.

 

Burzynska’s willingness to improvise is further evident in the ways the Osmologies works playfully riff on participants’ recollections of smelly objects and environments. For example, Nyal’s hue tied with gold ribbon constitutes a cross-cultural pun in olfactory and visual domains, blending memories of the scents of dyes employed in the creation of piupiu at Tuahiwi marae with remembrances of vintage perfumes. Here, the link is with Nyal’s Instagram blog, entitled Memoirs of a Perfumista, on which ornate bottles from international perfumeries are illustrated.3 Erin’s ‘mixtape’ was a response to its subject’s recollection of a very specific series of discrete scents in combination with their involvement in MAINZ (Music and Audio Institute of New Zealand) programmes in Ōtautahi. This inspired the utilisation of an olfactory cassette and further collaborations with its designers, Jas Brooks and Pedro Lopez.4 Gifted to the artist by the person it references, Charlie’s blanched and drooping Snoopy ad libs on its donor’s memories of soft toys imbued with comforting smells of home in otherwise-alienating institutional settings. Exemplifying Burzynska’s willingness to make the most of what is found (or given), Snoopy, painted white and presented in a white space, constitutes a readymade opportunity to fetter vision in order that scent (and texture) be given rein.5

 

However much the Osmologies works exploit the vagaries of chance or arrive at solutions to creative problems through trial and error, one suspects that Burzynska’s earlier investigations of the synaesthetic entanglements of taste and sound (not to mention her parallel profession as a wine critic, regularly writing for NZ Herald and other publications) impelled her olfactory improvisations in fruitful directions. Particularly relevant here is Burzynska’s doctoral research on ‘crossmodal correspondences’, in the course of which she created a series of multisensory, multimedia installations in order to elucidate novel concepts like ‘sensory terroir’ and ‘oenosthesia’.6

 

Given that Osmologies extends this practice in the olfactory arena, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Burzynska plays down the more conventionally aesthetic (i.e. visual) properties of the works included, stressing that practical considerations governed the selection, repurposing and fabrication of the material items employed. The capacity to hold and diffuse smells was the primary imperative; decisions about objects followed. That said, and notwithstanding Osmologies’ emphasis on creating olfactory translations of memories of smell, the objects serving as vessels of scent and sources of fragrant emission certainly demand attention in their own right. Indeed, one might argue that the expressive qualities of Burzynska’s works—that is, their potential to represent memory or convey emotion—arise from the tension they precipitate between the material and the immaterial, the bounded physicality of scent-laden objects and the unbounded non-physicality of these objects’ redolent dissemination. In consequence, it seems entirely in keeping with the crossmodal character of Burzynska’s practice that the diverse objects employed catch the eye just as much as the nose as they chart a Dada-esque trajectory through the gallery space—like a trail of happy accidents, playfully and often ingeniously transitioning from handcrafted items to re-purposed ready-mades in which the products of nature and industry are freely juxtaposed.

 

Here, it may be noted that the promotion of olfaction as a vehicle of potential subjective revelation underscores one of the most tantalising questions Burzynska’s exhibition raises: ‘If we inhale another’s memories, might we understand each other differently or perhaps more deeply?’7 Insofar as the Osmologies works advance smell as a mode of communicating subjective experiences, memories and meanings—thereby engendering the possibility of more profound intersubjective understandings—I would suggest that one might usefully conceive of them as making scents/sense. Here, the homophony of ‘scents’ and ‘sense’, at once separated and conjoined with the aid of a /, virgule, or solidus is intended to convey how the works in question represent subjectivity in terms of dualities of chemistry and cognition, sensing and thinking, soma and psyche. The superposition of scents/sense in the Osmologies olfactory portraits serves as a useful figure for the way that Burzynska’s work traverses boundaries dividing (thereby rendering ambiguous precise distinctions between) ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘self’ and ‘otherness’, ‘real’ and ‘representation’. This emphasis on dialectical relationships—often between ostensibly incommensurable categories—is characteristic of the artist’s creative practice more generally, reflecting how her investigations of place and personhood highlight relativity and contradiction even as they seek to elucidate essential truths. In so doing, they also reflect a practice fruitfully exploiting certain impasses or discontinuities obtaining between the sciences and humanities. For Burzynska, the traditional divide between empirical disciplines like psychology and neuroscience, and alternative perspectives informed by cultural studies and literary criticism, would seem to be no obstacle but rather a creative resource. 

 

The manner by which the Osmologies olfactory vignettes productively entangle (and, ultimately, exceed and elude consideration in terms of) the categories of inside and outside invites further consideration. As a first step, we might revisit the exhibition pamphlet, which states that the portraits ‘interact with interiors rather than the exteriors and surfaces picked up by visual sight’. Here, the ‘interiorities’ in question would seem to be manifold. The word ‘interiors’ admits consideration as applying, variously, to (i) subjective experience (whether the memories of the subjects of the artist’s scent-portraits or the associations these works excite in the noses and minds of gallery visitors), (ii) the internal structure of the exhibited objects (especially those functioning as containers or repositories of scents) and (iii) the interiority of the gallery space within which the fragrant emission of Osmologies’ smelly objects inevitably comingles, ‘making a larger, immaterial central work in which experiences coalesce’. However, that Burzynska’s Osmologies works represent their subjects’ spoken and written testimonies of memories of olfactory experiences with the aid of smelly objects disposed in the gallery space underscores their ambiguous traversing of the boundary between inside and outside.

 

Only at first glance (or, perhaps, that should be at first inhalation), does it seem as if the subjective interiority of personal and private experience is expressed via the objective exteriority of the publicly exhibited artwork. It is important to reiterate that, strictly speaking, Burzynska’s objects, whilst certainly engaging in their own right, are the means rather than the ends by which there is attempted a making scents/sense of personhood. Indeed, the degree to which the Osmologies pieces function as assemblages (Erin’s olfactory cassette; Hama’s handwoven harakeke kete), collections of components (Hannah’s pillows and oxygen mask), or mini-installations (Charlie’s draped sheet, suspended globes of scented liquid, and ‘occluded vitrines’) further complicates understandings of them solely as objets d’art. More precisely, they utilise objects as storage media in which Burzynska’s olfactory compositions proper are temporarily deposited prior to their transmission into the gallery environment. To this extent, the Osmologies portraits recall Burzynska’s sound art practice insofar as they are, fundamentally, time- and process-based works. In the space of Blue Oyster, the works’ fragrant release is akin to a chorus of slowly decaying tones; a host of pre-recorded playbacks auto-erasing over time.8 And yet this material evanescence frames an immaterial persistence insofar as, in seeking to make scents/sense of memories of smell, the scent pouring out of Burzynska’s smelly objects draws us into a space of memory until it is only the memory of scent that remains.

 

The very title of the Osmologies show also emphasises how the exhibited works traverse boundaries between inside and outside or, more precisely, self and otherness. Relevant here is the way Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott use the term ‘osmologies’ to define ‘classificatory systems based on smell’ or ‘to refer to how societies order the cosmos through and in terms of concepts derived from olfaction’.9 Burzynska herself employed the following short quote from this text to introduce her exhibition: 

'Odours are invested with cultural values and employed by society as a means of and model for defining and interacting with the world. The intimate, emotionally charged nature of the olfactory experience ensures that such value-coded odours are interiorized by the members of a society in a deeply personal way.'10

 

The flavour of the testimonies presented in the Osmologies pamphlet underscores this point. Burzynska’s creative collaborators offer disclosures of olfactory capacities and experiences that are, at once, very personal, but also typically situated in various social and cultural contexts. For example, Hannah refers to possessing a ‘sense of smell’ that is ‘hyperactive, often overwhelming’—but then qualifies this statement with reference to a harrowing surgical procedure and unpleasant memories of characteristically impersonal (if not depersonalising) hospital smells (hand soap, plastic, oxygen masks). Recalling ‘smell memories … from food’ consumed during visits to the family farm in Northland, Nico remarks on the ‘smell of cow dung and hessian that permeated through the food’ as being a ‘pungent but exciting memory’—but then immediately frames the singularity of this experience in terms of a ‘celebration’ of family, place, and cultural affiliations both Māori and Malaysian.11 These commentaries emphasise how Osmologies is an exhibition fully cognizant of the ways in which individuals and wider social and cultural structures are reciprocally entangled. In seeking to transform spoken and written testimony of private, idiosyncratic and subjective remembrances of smell into a more public, universal and objective ‘language’ of olfaction, these olfactory portraits are not merely representations of individuals (or, to be more precise, a making scents/sense of individually given testimonies of memories with olfactory resonances) but also portraits of the societies and cultures these individuals comprise, and within which they emerge and remain enmeshed.

 

As a final observation that, by no means, claims to square Burzynska’s creative circle, the manner by which the Osmologies portraits enact entanglements and interweavings of inside and outside is evident from their stated aim to ‘expose histories less known, what is passed over when predominant Western-centric biographical methods are used for documentation, such as writing and visual depiction’.12 This demonstrates to what degree these works offer to redefine the boundaries of the category of traditional, Western-European art in which vision is the privileged mode of aesthetic experience. In part, this challenge is delivered with the aid of culturally diverse perspectives on olfaction, reflecting some of the knowledge and experiences of mana whenua of Aotearoa—not to mention olfactory cultures from Thailand and Malaysia. However, insofar as they employ olfaction as a vehicle of representation, the Osmologies compositions are also engaged in interrogating and extending traditional, Western-European conceptions of ‘portraiture’—just as Burzynska’s earlier explorations of sensory terroir can be understood as interrogating and extending traditional, Western-European conceptions of ‘landscape’.13 Thus, the Osmologies works are olfactory portraits in which making scents/sense of personhood necessitates more than the presentation of a visual likeness (a much less ‘unproblematic’ or ‘objective’ feature than might be supposed), demanding, instead, a more nuanced negotiation of the antinomies inside/outside, self/otherness and real/representation. Perhaps, the critical point here is that, in its intermedia and crossmodal approach, Burzynska’s practice is, simultaneously, inside and outside traditional, Western-European fine art categories like portraiture and landscape; these terms remain applicable only inasmuch as they are subject to radical revision and renegotiation.

1 Jo Burzynska, Osmologies exhibition pamphlet, (Dunedin: Blue Oyster, 2023), n.p. For the sake of completeness, I should mention that these six olfactory portraits were accompanied by a seventh work entitled Inspiration located in the front gallery area on the wall opposite to that on which Erin was installed. Reflecting the sound art dimension of Burzynska’s ‘crossmodal’ art practice, Inspiration comprised a looped recording of respiratory sounds intended to gently remind gallery visitors to breathe. That ‘inspiration’ might be considered a parapraxis, stumbling over the words ‘inhalation’ and ‘respiration’, further underscores the function of this work as framing olfaction in aural terms.

2 Burzynska, Osmologies. Unless otherwise noted, further details of Burzynska’s collaborations with participants and the process of creating the Osmologies works draw on my conversations with the artist at her home on 1 to 3 December 2023, and emails exchanged November 2023 to January 2024.

3 See Nyal T. Dillimore, memoirsofaperfumista, Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/memoirsofaperfumista/?hl=en, accessed 13 January 2024.

4 See Jas Brooks and Pedro Lopes, ‘Smell & Paste: Low-Fidelity Prototyping for Olfactory Experience’, in CHI ’23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ed. Albrecht Schmidt et al. (New York: Association for Computing Systems, 2023), 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580680. 

5 Relevant here is Charlie’s testimony: ‘I don’t think my senses are enhanced because I’m blind. I just use them more’; Burzynska, Osmologies, n.p.

6 See Jo Burzynska, ‘Tuning Sensory Terroir: Mapping Correspondences between Sound and Wine in Crossmodal Art Practice’ (PhD diss.: University of New South Wales, 2020). Burzynska presents a definition of ‘crossmodal correspondences’ in the introduction (4); specifically, she refers to scholarship in the field of psychology and neuroscience, citing commentaries such as those of Charles Spence, where these phenomena are defined as ‘nonarbitrary associations that appear to exist between different basic physical stimulus attributes, or features, in different sensory modalities’; Charles Spence, ‘Crossmodal Correspondences: A Tutorial Review’, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics 73, no. 4 (2011): 971–995, here at 972. Burzynska’s employment of the term ‘sensory terroir’ draws on the ‘French concept of terroir’, a word referring to ‘the symbiotic environment and human factors that combine to create the overall character of a wine from a specific place’. On this basis, she characterises sensory terroir as ‘an interlaced sensuous system’ by which to ‘explore the connections between the senses, people, and … [her] own practice’; Burzynska, ‘Tuning Sensory Terroir’, 2. Oenosthesia was the neologism Burzynska applied to her ‘first ever work using sound and wine’, which was initially presented in 2012 at the Interferenze New Art Festival’s Factory of Art Rurality and Media, and subsequently informed her paper ‘Assessing Oenosthesia: Blending Wine and Sound’, International Journal of Food Design 3, no. 2 (October 2018): 83–101; Burzynska, ‘Tuning Sensory Terroir’, 9, 48–49.

7 Burzynska, Osmologies, n.p.

8 A similar ‘self-destruction’ would seem intrinsic to the Erin ‘mixtape’ olfactory cassette given that its ‘Scratch n Sniff’ scent patches will wear away over time.

9 Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994), 95, 218n1.

10 Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma, 3, quoted in Osmologies: Jo Burzynska, Blue Oyster exhibition webpage, https://blueoyster.org.nz/exhibitions/osmologies/ and Burzynska, Osmologies, n.p. 

11 Burzynska, Osmologies, n.p.

12 Burzynska, Osmologies, n.p.

13 Relevant here are Burzynska’s Risonanze di Vino (resonances of wine; 2018) and Sensory Terroir (2020), both of which may be regarded as aural and gustatory landscapes (indeed, the artist employs the term sensescapes in referring to these works). On these, see Burzynska, ‘Tuning Sensory Terroir’, 184–86, 210–12. It should be noted that Risonanze di Vino comprised six separate multisensory, multimedia sensescapes combining wine and sound. As Burzynska relates (184n715), the term ‘sensescape’ is borrowed from David Howes, who suggests that it is ‘the idea that the experience of the environment, and of other persons and things which inhabit that environment, is produced by the particular mode of distinguishing, valuing and combining the senses in the culture under study’; David Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2005), 143. Sensory Terroir is noteworthy for eschewing the format of a gallery-based installation in favour of a more self-contained and embodied expression taking the form of a wine box containing a bottle of wine from the Amorotto winery in Abruzzo, Central Italy, serving implements, a blindfold, and, encased in a wine cork, a USB drive presenting the aural component of the work. The Sensory Terroir box is an important precedent for Burzynska’s practice in the field of object-based art, bearing comparison with the likes of Marcel Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise (1935–41) and, as Burzynska herself acknowledges, the later Fluxkits produced by the Fluxus artists in the early 1960s; see Burzynska, ‘Turning Sensory Terroir’, 211n781. 

David Khan

David Khan is a writer and sound artist living in Ōamaru. He has been involved with the alternative and experimental music scene in Ōtautahi since the mid 1990s and, more recently, contributed to the managing and curatorial committees of the Auricle Sound and Wine Gallery. He works as a part-time teaching assistant, tutor and lecturer at the University of Canterbury.