Carbon Rose 1 - Radiation Series

The intention is to try to create an olfactory experience of a fire ravaged Rose Garden. This came about when I recieved a sample of Rectified Birch Tar, an extremely powerful substance that basically smells like bottled smoke.

I think about this accord as belonging to the Gothic style, funereal and something of a memorial. The desire then, is for a number of states of time to be expressed - the instant when the rose is burnt and releases its fragrance, (but in slow motion) and then the smell of the fire itself and its afterimage, a blanket of burnt timber.

This has sparked the idea of a "Radiation" series that are about energy - forces.The smell of a lightning storm, burning electrical wires, negative & positive ions, the smell of the sea and in this case, charred roses. What would an Atom bomb blast smell like? I have something in my collection which smells flinty, chipped granite or sand stone - it smells like broken rock.

" The quick of life would be the burn of a wound - a hurt so lively, a flame so avid that it is not content to live & be present, but consumes all that is present till presence is precisely what is exempt from the present. The quick of life is the exemplarity, in the abscence of any example, of un-presence, of un-life; absence in its vivacity always coming back without ever coming. "

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster.

Notes: Ozone, Rose Otto, Pyroclastic smoke, Charcoal, Crushed green leaves.

It has turned into a cigar accord. The start is exactly like opening a box of cigars, we then smell the rose. Time to get out the Indole.

Mis en Scene

The arrival of a landscape. It arrives, not in totality, nor as an ideal form because we are actually in it, but as a series of apprehended moments; movement as strobe, through the field of framed vision and with the thump of the feet that goes up to the pelvis, an obscure filtered low frequency plodding. But the ideal form is never far away. In these days of google earth some of us even carry a mental picture that comes from "space ships" of the country we are moving through - a kind of map image.

lonely walker humanoid
listening to forgotten sounds
tasting smells and colours
hiking mounts crossing rivers
humble biped you've come undone
you detached the mechanical
freedom it inspires
fusing with your desire
primal hiker lonely walker
re-discovering your own pace
left here to go elsewhere
abandon all impatience

reposess the senses
impression of freedom
time doesn't know itself
has mingle path and dream
animal survivor
you belong to nature
reposess the senses
impression of freedom
time doesn't know itself
has mingle path and dream

Stereolab: Puncture In The Radax Permutation

Fragmentary and through time, always moving through - always within - unfolding against the (un)fixed horizon - the curved line ahead, impossible to take in all the details simply because one with such a dangerous fixation, would fall into the deepest well, an abyss that would end in madness.

The general nature of what we call “the atmospheric” is certainly true to the word. “Something has taken over and filled the air” or “its misty today, we are living in a cloud” Atmospheres are diffusive and broadband and full of noise.

The radius that is always unfolding, the radius of vision; Would it be possible to put into the bottle a fearsome smell – the smell that makes ones skin crawl – undoubtedly a poison, but imagine a benign odorant, that sparked that creepy feeling you get when alone at night sometimes. Hormones or adrenaline relatives maybe ?


Fragrance as cinematic moment and meez on son, an installation in a bottle.

“Limitless space where a sun would attest not to the day, but to the night delivered of stars, multiple night “ Maurice Blanchot

The Sun -blinding, unrepresentable - always present.