Madeleines
Artist
When I was in school, one of my favourite escapist past times was to go sniff perfume at the local Ogilvy with a couple of my smartest friends. As we were always broke, this was a purely sensory pursuit, rather than shopping. We had to strategize how to get the salespeople to let us smell as many things as we could, and sometimes even give us samples. The performance of being potential buyers became part of the ritual.
The final element of these excursions was to describe, in detail, for whom or what we imagined the perfumes we won, (in samples or on our wrists,) were designed.
Megan Hepburn’s practice is based in painting and olfactory art and prioritizes bodily knowledge. Her work is a material inquiry into disparate histories and temporal drifts in the ways we relate to our environments, with particular interest in conflicts between sensorial perception and non-intuitive learning. Grounded in the long histories of painting, her work re-considers the physical materials of art making and their narratives, especially in practices with botanical, mineral and animal-derived elements. Through lenses of craft, discipline and labour she reevaluates these material narratives to expose and tease out problematic myths and biases in both painting and olfactory work. She received her MFA from Concordia University in 2010 and is a self-taught perfumer. Recent exhibitions include Fielding Road at the Nanaimo Art Gallery and Passing Through Smoke, at CSA Space, Vancouver.
cracherdanslasoupeparfum.org
Instagram: @cracherdanslasoupe
Megan Hepburn
Search for the scent of a poem.
Invitation
Together in a small group, create a packet of poems and share them amongst the participants.
Each participant selects a poem from the packet, and goes perfume hunting with their poem in mind. Don’t tell anyone which poem you have selected! Have a backup poem or two in case you don't find the perfume for your first choice.
Participants request to smell perfumes. The goal is to get the salesperson to let you smell things until you find the perfect scent that evokes your chosen poem. Perhaps you’re a serious buyer, just browsing, searching for a lost scent, etc. You might want to create a whole backstory. Be open-minded in sniffing. Take your time, and let imagery and associations come to you as you smell things, rather than trying to nail a literal representation of the words or imagery in the poem.
Once you find the perfume, request a sample.
When everyone has had a chance to track down a scent, participants come together to contemplate the scents. One at a time, the group sniffs the scent and tries to guess which poem the participant had in mind. Take your time smelling the different notes. What associations do they bring up? Smell for a mood, emotion, texture or environment, or for specific objects or images.
Make a guess, swap, and begin again.
Note: This provocation requires two or more participants who share some context, such as: being in a writing class together, another kind of art class together or being reasonably close friends who share some literary, poetic or artistic interests.