SMELL BAR #1 JP

– a bar for sniffing –

site specific research / installation (2010)


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The premier of SMELL BAR was presented at the Electric Eclectic Festival 08, Meaford, Canada in August 2008.

SMELL BAR is a bar for sniffing. The bottles on the bar counter are at your disposal. You can sniff them from the bottles or with the perfume strips. It is an installation with which you can smell and experience the local smells.

The each smell is extracted manually from materials found in the environment. Thus they together form the environmental smell as collective.

In the fieldwork the environment is being explored and experienced by means of smell. Then the smells are extracted freshly on-site. It’s because that the preservation of natural smell is almost impossible because of the character of the smell molecules: they are easy to viporate and decay. This work is not site-specific, but the extracts have to be made on-time on-site. The results are not a perfume to wear, but to smell and trigger one’s emotion and imagination.
These smells below were found and extracted for the Meaford version.

 

  • No. 1 White Clover (oil)
  • No. 2 Red Clover (oil)
  • No. 3 Spruce Leaves (oil)
  • No. 4 Pine Leaves (water distillation)
  • No. 5 Yew (tincture)
  • No. 6 Pine Leaves (tincture)
  • No. 7 Grass (tincture)
  • No. 8 White Clover (tincture)
  • No. 9 Queen Anne’s Lace (tincture)
  • No.10 Pink Clover (tincture)
  • ….
  • No.19 Grass (oil)
  • No.20 Spruce Leaves (soxhlet extraction)

fieldwork: researching smells in the environment

The festival was taking place in a farm environment called ‘funny farm’. The map indicates where the smelly materials were collected.

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extraction process

The natural energy as sun light and the warm temperature was used for extracting the smells as much as possible.

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bar counter & mobile lab

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workshop: Wonder Art version 2009

For the WonderArt(Japan) version that takes place on 1st of August 2009, I will find the smells in a forest and extract them together with the children of age 7 – 12 on-site. We will share the inspirations and wonders. What do you smell now? Where does it come from? How would you describe the smell? Why does it smell and what you smell? I assume that we will find the different smells of flower, leaf, tree bark, root, sand, mud, animal shit, etc. 30 different scents will be extracted. (the same amount as the participants) It’s a 1-day workshop al-together. The extracted smells will be exhibited as SMELL BAR after that.
exhibition:Date：2009.8.10(Mon)－8.23(Sun）Place：Tokyo Wonder Sitehttp://www.tokyo-ws.org/ SMELL BAR (2008)Maki Ueda

This work was a part of the Electric Eclectic Festival 08, Meaford, Canada