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