Showing posts with label
Listen with your Nose Lura Astor.
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Showing posts with label
Listen with your Nose Lura Astor.
Show all posts
Secrets can be ... seductive
- from the film Notes on a Scandal
Secrets of Scent Revealed through Textiles, Color, Food
The language of flowers and spices is spoken throughout cultures’ life and death passages, with variant uses in courting, grooming, anointing, pleasure, medicine, and within spiritual and sociological arenas.
Flowers and spices are included in pattern, are found in tombs, and with mummies. click here
They fragrance hats and baths, adorn necklines and icons, show status by the ear and in the hair, wrap the waist, present laurels, and are seen being given and received.
Scent includes the language of forests: wood, resins and animal products.
With technological advances we identify fragrant residues left within pomanders, vials, bottles and rings.
Snuff boxes, and their earlier equivalents, reveal not only tobacco leaf, but lavender, rose, and ingredients such as the medicinal, or shamanic, anadenanthera colubrina var. cebil (fabaceae).
Fabrics drape over incense burners throughout cultures and paintings.
Moth repellent scents of patchouli or vetiver were proof of authentic import in the profitable, early shawl trade.
photo: Train Nose Lura Astor excerpt from presentation
Listen
as we forge ways,
new and old,
of delivering olfactory imagination
in conjunction
with other media -LA
Bottles, Jars, Apothecary, Alchemists, Amphoras, Vials, Pomanders and Jewels
the marriage of heated sand in the form of glass with volatility in the form of perfume, cologne, fragrance
Timelines of containers, ceramic and glass work, pomanders and jewelry, reveal layers of understanding when one has a guide explaining what the contained scent was used for, made from, smelled like, during any period of human existence and expression.
These relationships are inseparable once one clearly sees, truly smells, the archeology, for then … craftsmanship, symbology, beauty, history and iconography come to renewed life.
Private and public collections throughout the world include the art of the miniature, or “minis”, exact replication of the original bottle and fragrance in miniature, and, factices, the large bottles used for display, holding colored liquid that is not perfume, but is often the same color of the original perfume.
Along with the written word, creative merging of performance, fine and curatorial arts is of keen interest to me. As scent designers in both the fragrance and the flavor worlds continually look for new delivery systems, I believe new delivery systems of fragrance knowledge, with its growing language and mediums, create opportunities and visibility for venues and institutions.
Integrate the information that scent ethnology unlocks into cataloguing and timelines. Our interpretation of history then improves as well as our understanding of artistic play and expression.
As I cast bait to various institutions and imaginations - let's see who bites! When they don't, I chew the bait myself. yum.
-Lura Astor
Listen With Your Nose
Illustration: Shimmer Lura Astor
Bottle Lura Astor
