I would love to be able to say “I’m a nose” when people ask what I do for a living – hell, they would believe it when they get a load of the Macnair Sail (as an Uncle described it once to my horrified brother).

I’ve been reading up about Berlin-based Norwegian ‘odour artist’ Sissel Tolaas who has created an archive of  over 6000 scents, “instead of writing a diary.”  Her work is about challenging our notions and associations with scent by creating her own for conceptual art. This has included building the smell of unventilated locker room which, according to the New York Times, she wore ‘an earlier version’ of to a party in Berlin thrown by the Brazilian ambassador.

“I was totally dressed up, then I put on the sweat of a guy, all over me. So, to many people at that party, I was stinking. The reaction was amazing. All the women were, ‘Ooh’…the men were very curious. But the women were insecure because the way I looked and the way I smelled did not fit at all.”

Know just what she’s talking about – sharp haircut / jaunty scarf simply doesn’t conjure up the idea of a bad case of BO.

Sissel’s work is amazingly varied. For the 2004 Berlin Biennial she produced her City Smell project, basing each of her scents on different neighborhoods in Berlin. In 2010, art mag Mono.Kultur dedicated its spring issue to her, doing away with imagery entirely and instead using perfume insert / scratch and sniff technology to impregnate the paper of the magazine with 12 of the artist’s scents – all recreations of sweat smells from the bodies of  men who suffer phobia attacks. In other words,the smell of fear.

Since then, Sissel has mapped the smellscapes of Calcutta and Istanbul, has exhibited in tons of museums including NYC’s MoMA and Tate Liverpool, and carried out research for Nasa no less, as well as working on commissions for the likes of Ikea, Comme des Garçons and Louis Vuitton. There’s also been a human cheese project.

photo by Peter Kaaden for Dazed & Confused

For a full interview with her from last year head over to Dazed. In the meantime, here’s a final quote attributed to her (source here):

“I see smell as information, or a tool of navigation and communication. How can you maximize the process of living by integrating these facts? Our society and culture have traditionally been dominated by the visual. Increasingly, however, there are signs of rejection—we are so sick of seeing and the predominance of vision. What happens when you let your eyes relax and perceive the same reality through your nose? What happens to your system and your relation to the system or situation you live in? Does something change? And if something changes, what are the consequences?”