Critical and popular writing often situate my experimental, socially engaged artwork within the emerging field of olfactory art. My art and writing explore the socio-aesthetic dimensions of olfactory space, with particular emphasis on the relationship between the materiality and temporality of scent molecules. Left to their own devices, smells do not respect boundaries, which makes them a challenging—if not hostile—sculptural medium. Their invisibility, however, enables arresting perceptual effects that can feel viscerally analogous to experiencing the physical and material qualities of sculpture.
Over the past decade, my work has been guided by a central question: How does your reality differ if you let your nose, rather than your eyes, lead the way? Each day, we breathe approximately 23,000 times. Provided our sinuses are clear, each of those breaths contains perceptible olfactory information; in other words, if we are breathing, we are smelling. Yet how often do we consider the implications of the scents that constitute our environment? My recent artworks examine the accidental and overlooked smells found in urban and rural settings (Sillage, 2011, 2014, 2016), and creatively organize them to tell cultural and environmental stories of migration (Scents of Exile, 2019-2022), gentrification (Smelling the City, 2011, 2013), and social identity (Olfactory Memoirs, 2015). To accomplish this, I design and compose with aromachemicals—perfume-grade olfactory materials that can be blended to create “scent-scapes” (Balboa Stories, 2015). I have explored the narrative potential of scent-scapes by observing how the molecular size of aromachemicals dictates their temporality (A Poetry Olfaction, 2015, 2016), allowing each component of a scent composition to evaporate predictably and convey an olfactory narrative that is literally consumed by the nose (Wenn Düfte Erzählen/When Fragrances Tell, 2019).
My research seeks to disrupt a longstanding sensory hierarchy in which the “upper senses” of sight and sound are associated with socially valued attributes, while the “lower senses” of smell, taste, and touch are linked to negative or lesser qualities. Reliance on this hierarchy has had a profound—and often profoundly damaging—impact on how we perceive the physical world and one another, particularly the non-Western other. My project-based artworks have examined the art museum as an institution shaped by Enlightenment-worldview norms and thus influenced by cultural and sensory biases (Institutional Wellbeing, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011). In addition to segregating the senses, the sensory hierarchy has stigmatized cross- and multi-modal sensations, including synesthesia. My collaborations with chemists, food studies scholars, social scientists, authors, and musicians have produced new scholarship in cross-modal research (Odophonics, 2015, 2016, 2023).
My current and future work attempts to define the contemporary through the senses of smell and taste (By Means of Smoke, 2022). These senses awaken us to the differences in how cultures experience the present. Literal and figurative migration brings together diverse olfactory rituals, many of them culinary in nature. We live in a period of post-colonial temporality: accelerated globalization connects disparate cultures, creating an interwoven set of temporalities. Geographic scent-scapes often reveal a culture’s identity, its relationship to place, and its conception of space and time.
My artistic methodology relies on open or relational systems that invite collaborative authorship and participatory engagement (5 Cocktails, 2022). These forms activate audiences, shifting their role from spectators to participants. In public art projects in particular, I conceptualize systems that incorporate a plurality of perspectives and celebrate the innumerable contributions of diverse communities. I am especially interested in temporary forms—what I call “counter-monuments”—because their ephemerality provokes memory and discourse while underscoring that public identity is always in flux. In my site- and context-responsive work, I use research methods that layer historical uses of a site with contemporary ones to reveal how evolving contexts address unmet needs.