Year: 2024
Medium: mixed (recycled plastic cloches, audio speakers, scent, ceramic, gouache, acrylic, wire)
As bell tones fade, blossom scents take up the ringing; evening shade – Matsuo Bashō
Sound and scent have regularly combined in the imagination across cultures. Examples of the senses blending within literature include Charles Baudelaire’s poem Correspondences, the ‘scent organ’ in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and the metaphor of blossoms and bells in Bashō’s Haiku above. This mingling of the aural and olfactory is not merely an artistic device; through both Jo Burzynska’s own research, and current scientific studies, many of the scent and sound combinations in this exhibition have been found to be widely associated together, such as earthy scents with low tones, and citrus with high.
Here, multisensory bells ring out a call to meditate on, nurture and celebrate resonances and interconnectivity through shared a sensory experience. Eight cloches, representing an octave of notes on a musical scale, are each perfumed with a single elemental or cultural scent. The scents are impregnated into a ceramic work that echoes the scent in form, texture and colour. Cultures from which scents are drawn from some of the main cultures of Aotearoa: Māori, Pasifika, Pāheka/European and Chinese. While focused within each bell, the scents also subtly mingle with each other in the gallery space.
Each bell also contains a speaker playing a sound that corresponds to its scent in pitch and timbre. The height of each bell is dictated by the perceived elevation of each scent and sound frequency. The upturned bell contains the lowest pitched sound, which corresponds to the scent of earth, and provides the root note of the sound work. The pitches in the bells above it correspond to melodic and harmonic intervals dominant in the different musical traditions of Aotearoa’s cultures. The sounds play at different times to create a generative audio work created of ever shifting melodies and harmonies, without beginning or end.
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Correspondence/dance by Lynley Edmeades
An opening: your ears are your eyes are your nose. A leak. Let us speak about it. Where the crossing becomes the place, the wondering becomes the stay. In this space, the sound of lemon is the spike of a wind chime. Over there: the smell of cut grass is smooth stele with angular ends, the haunting of a ship’s bell long since sailed. Your
bulbous brain is not useful here. Your attention is all that is needed. Cloche yourself. Be an accordance: let the touching correspond. Take this and listen. Close eyes. Take this and smell. Open eyes. Walk on. Let the call of the kōkako break your heart. Breathe the sound of the fangufangu through your nose like the one who
plays it. You will know it when you let it be unknown. But what does it mean, you ask yourself. How does one touch the earthiness of earth inside the ears? How does one taste the distorted gonging bellows of Sichuan pepper in the eyes? Let your fingers sniff and your eyes touch. Let yourself be mingled. But be warned: your body might have some difficulty knowing where one sense, place or part begins and where another
sense, a second place or nearby patch ends. There will be bleeds. From where you are standing, beside mushroom-bulb-vibration or lemon-spike-yelp, you might also hear something of frangipani-heart-hum. Like your body, the patches cannot be contained. The patches leak. Like pollen. Like a foolish jar. Be not in your logic right now. Let meaning—these words, your
questions—exit. Lemon is as lemon does. It holds a certain pushing in its membranes. It waits to spike, to reach for upper. There is a whole lifetime in a glass cloche of lemon spikes. Your hearing of the clapper’s smell begins and ends with language. But even then, this language is straining to reach you, to steer you away from meaning. Let the meaning
subside. These words are little enclosures, too tight in their hope for borders. Your job is to let them leak, like the sound-smell of this rebellious space. Let one sound push up against another, let sound be smell be sound be smell. Let this leak into taste and touch, those things you’ll do as much through your eyes as you will do with your fingers and tongue. Let this sound-smell be your second tongue. You will know it
when you arrive. You will feel the dot dot dot of an ellipsis in your left ear and you will know that you have returned to the immediacy of the senses… Let yourself be mingled, un-bordered. Take time, remain silent, taste. Taste the meaning and then discard it. Let the residual meaning get mixed up with sound and smell. Let kōkako be heard in the nose and roaring fire be felt
in the eyes. Let yourself drone and let your drone leak. Think: sound-time. Think: smell-time. Think: silence-time. Let yourself leak and let your leak drone, into
silence and
time.
* italics denote citations from The Five Senses by Michel Serres
Risonanze di Vino:
The projects are contextualised within current discourse around the Anthropocene through the curatorial contributions from Interferenze’s Leandro Pisano and Pollinaria’s Gaetano Carboni. If the Anthropocene is a sensorial phenomenon, sound art could be well placed to expose symbiotic coexistences and initiate resonances that shift perceptions.
current doctoral research exploring the sensory and aesthetic interactions between wine and sound has been published in 
Montesarchio, Italy, October 2018
“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists … the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
One of the central parts of my Culture at Work Art-Science residency was an audio-olfactory experiment in which I sought to identify correspondences between a selection of different sounds and aromas and gain insights into how these might be emotionally, conceptually or perceptually influenced. Past studies have identified sound-smell correspondences that people appear to share, and have started to examine what might be behind these. However, while the role of emotion has been explored and identified as one of the factors likely mediating audio-olfactory correspondences, no study to date has examined the personal associations and memories that may play a part in this. Given this gap, I was keen to incorporate this into my own research.
Assisting me in the experimental design, was my residency science partner, the cognitive neuroscientist and specialist in sensory processing and synaesthesia, Associate Professor Anina Rich of Macquarie University, and her colleague Mem Mahmut, a psychologist specialising in olfaction. On 19th July, 14 participants progressed round my series of ten “smelling stations”, where they’d rate an unidentified aroma for a number of characters. These characters included personal preference and perceptual characters such as harshness/softness. They were also asked to guess what they thought the aroma might be and whether the aroma evoked any personal associations or memories. A similar set of questions was asked for the six sound/music samples that were played over the course of the experiment. Participants went on to rate the match of each of the ten aromas that they encountered with each of the sound samples, and select a sound frequency level on a tone generator that they felt best matched each aroma.
Jo Burzynska’s Amazuppai work for sound and wine was part of 
Monday, 5 September 2016 from 19:00 to 20:30
