"Put yourself in my shoes" is a common phrase used to describe a situation to make an effort to imagine how you would feel or act if you were in the same situation as a particular person. Put yourself in my collar, acts as the same notion, but for objects.
The idea of giving a voice to the objects to convey their feelings and thoughts through the medium of smell! This forms my museum of breath of the Wymering Manor.
(Image: Akshitha Nadella, 2023)
It is not only people who contain the memory of a place: Buildings and the things within (tangible and intangible) too are loaded with memories of the uses and lives that occupy/occupied them. The built fabric reflects social behaviour. As a designer, to read the memories held in buildings and people is to think about a future that depends on the past. My idea is to give a voice to the manor that it longs for, but not necessarily through sound! It is said that, sometimes the smell or the perfume holds the memories of a space much stronger than the sounds.
My work has been inspired by two olfactory artists and a textile artist.
1. Otobong Nkanga’s Anamnesis. (1)
(Image: Lary Shiner, 2019)
A long freestanding white wall, with a dark, river-like incision running around it at nose level. She filled the incision with aromatic coffee beans, chopped tobacco leaves, cloves and other spices of the kind that had been exploited in the African colonial trade. As visitors walked along smelling the brown slash, they were given a palpable experience of Nkanda’s anti-colonial message.
2. Christophe Laudamiel’s “Over 21” (2)
(Image: Lary Shiner, 2019)
Laudamiel had placed ten canisters of synthetic scents he had created around a dining table; they bore names like Sweat or Sex? or Secret Grass. At the exhibit opening, visitors dipped perfume blotters into a small hole in the top of each canister, inhaled scents and wrote down their reactions.
3. Shelly Goldsmith
Goldsmith’s practice investigates the power of cloth and worn clothing as a rich landscape for expression, a place to explore and communicate ideas. With a feminist viewpoint she unpicks established psychological theory to better understand human interactions, how we live our life and what shapes us. Taking an autoethnographic approach her position is both personal and parsing, discarded textiles become witness and memoranda; using our clothes as a place we inhabit as home, psychologically and physically. At every turn our world presents evidence of this truly ‘mobile home’, living life in cloth, from ordinary day-to-day routines and ceremony like weddings to powerfully emotive life events, such as migration and displacement.
Her work is conceived and produced with sustainability at its heart, using recycled and repurposed cloth, especially reclaimed polyesters, putting them to good use as creative ambassadors in our world
(Images: Shelly Goldsmith, Instgram, 2022)
I specifically found these works of art very intriguing and wanted to bring a part of them into my work.
The story of Wymering manor as a Museum of Breath specifically deals with the objects in the manor and the stories they hold within from a long period, to be expressed with their scent. The object, otherwise gone unnoticed are given a medium, which is the collar (made out of discarded fabric pieces, thrown away by the fashion design students) to express their thoughts. The collars are given the same exact scent as the object that they are put on. These collars are then worn by the visitors, visitors are then put in the shoes of the object to experience and depict their own thoughts of the object.
(Image: Akshitha Nadella, 2023)
(Image: Akshitha Nadella,2023)
While these objects, shuffled around and now go sit in their space in the manor for the display, the structure of the manor remains unchanged. I believe that though the manor is not in a great condition to be the house that it was once, it is still sturdy and holds the strength that it has been given over different times. Since our roots are still at the heart of being sustainable and conscious of our every action towards climate change, in my proposal, the manor stays the way it is! Only the curative narratives inside the manor are to be re-arranged.
REFERENCES
(1) Bridget, Reilley O'Carroll. (August 8, 2018). From the cutting room floor: Otobong Nakanga. MCA Magazine. https://mcachicago.org/Publications/Blog/2018/From-The-Cutting-Room-Floor-Otobong-Nkanga
(2) Vipin, Mero. (13 September). Christophe Laudamiel: Unravelling the Art and Science of Smell. Medium. https://medium.com/@merovipin18/christophe-laudamiel-unravelling-the-art-and-science-of-smell-fad93ec2077e
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