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Val the Cookie Queen
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Hello APJ.
There is no pleasure without DOULEUR: French for pain.
“Pain and pleasure. …… I think it is subtly strange, and uncomfortable, and disturbing …… and yet there is a softness, and a sweetness that gradually shines through, that cannot immediately be seen through the piercing beginning. This has been a love filled, explosively creative project, and I am so excited for people to experience DOULEUR.” Freddie Albrighton.
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Post by Suzanne R Banks
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Hi APJ,
Our aim is to demonstrate that these divine gifts from Mother Nature are more than beautiful aromatic plants. They hold a life force of their own that when inhaled transport you to another place and time. This alone gives them amazing healing properties, in addition to the beautiful and captivating scents they hold.
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Like our Facebook page to stay tuned for more info on the inaugural
Australasian Artisan Botanical Perfume Expo in Sydney, October 2016
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Check out my YouTube Channel too, thanks
Suzanne R Banks Blog
Suzanne R Banks Aromatherapy
Suzanne R Banks FaceBook
Please check out my new book REVELATION! – Reveal Your Destiny with Essential Oils
(Ed: Since this post was written the date has changed to October 2016. I have changed title and content to reflect this)
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Post by Azar
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Today the Australian perfume Junkies are thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with Saskia Wilson-Brown, the founder of the LA based Institute for Art and Olfaction. Winners are listed HERE<<<JUMP
This is the second in the Saskia Wilson-Brown Interview Series: Please have a look through the first: The Institute for Art and Olfaction: Saskia Wilson-Brown Interview #1
Regarding the 2014 Art and Olfaction Awards: What made you decide that the world needed another awards night and why about fragrance?
Ha! A fair question. The world does most definitely not need another awards night. However: Independent and artisan perfumers need some support, and so we decided it would be a good idea to help provide it, in the way we were most capable of doing so. We are going to try to be more about curation than competition.
Both panels of judges are made up of some of the best-known noses in the world! How were you able to put these panels together and how long did it take?
To be honest, it was merely a question of asking! All of the judges were happy to participate, and extremely supportive. It took a few months to put the panel together, and I am extremely grateful to them for the time and energy they put into the process. Very very caring and honest people, all of them, and not an inflated ego in sight. The big question is: Would they consider doing it again. Ha.
The IAO website goes into detail about the Awards selection process and judging criteria. Did the finalists receive written evaluations/adjudications of their work?
No, unfortunately, there is only so much time in the day, we simply couldn’t offer that sort of feedback. We already asked a lot of the judges: The preliminary judges all smelled every submission. That’s just under a hundred perfumes, and I wasn’t prepared to ask them to write evaluations for every perfume, as well.
We built the awards on the film festival model, and we basically stuck to that formula, but adding the anonymity factor to ensure fairness as ours is such a small little world, at the end of the day. Generally speaking, it’s not my first time running a big initiative like this, and my rule of thumb is this: Know your limits, stick to the plan, don’t ask for more than people have time to deliver.
However, as the awards expand, we will try to build in more feedback mechanisms. One of the things I feel most guilty about in our first year is that we just didn’t have the time to email all the submitters who didn’t make it to the the finalist round. I have submitted to things before, and I know what it feels like to get a nice email, versus just… silence. In fact, I just recently got a very kind rejection letter from a big institution, and it made the experience much less disappointing. So that’s something we need to fix for next year.
Was there one moment at the Awards Ceremony (or the after party) that you found especially funny, surprising or touching?
Well, the whole thing was a blur, for me, to be honest. It was a lot of work and there were a lot of moving parts. I did really enjoy having my friend Tom Green on the drums – it added a little bit of irreverence, and the audience all called out ‘drum roll Tom’ when the presenter was about to announce a winner, which was pretty fun and goofy. All our presenters were incredibly amazing, as well. Ashley Eden Kessler, Ilene Hoffman, Hank Jenkins, Sarah Horowitz-Thran, Steven Gontarski, James McHugh, Koan Jeff Baysa and of course Adam Eastwood and Franco Wright from Lucky Scent. Another thing I loved was the smell-and-repeat. It was a silly idea I had, playing off the Hollywood premiere trope of having a step-and-repeat logo wall where famous people step, pose and repeat for photographers. It ended up being quite fun. We sprayed it with the finalist perfumes, so as people entered the Goethe Institut they could catch a whiff of what this was all about.
The first Art and Olfaction Awards will be a hard act to follow. What have you learned from the First Annual that you can use in 2015?
Here is what I am taking from the first year: Avoid the big egos, support the people who support you, allow more time for submissions to arrive, allow more time for the judges to judge, and thank the people who make this happen over and over again.
Finally – I really enjoyed the seven questions you posed to the finalists and their revealing answers! To paraphrase one of your own questions: What excites you about your life right now?
I find the major mistakes I seem to be making on a daily basis to be particularly exciting. When I was younger and more malleable, I used to be quite serious about snowboarding. The big lesson in snowboarding is that if you’re not constantly falling down, you’re not learning. It’s trite, but it’s true.
Photo of Saskia donated by Institute for Art & Olfaction
Thank you so much, Saskia, for taking the time from your very busy schedule to share your thoughts with the APJ. We are looking forward to another great year with the IAO, filled with exciting projects and educational opportunities.
Azar xx
Book sessions on Eventbrite: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/open-sessions-may-tickets-11361465449
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Post by Azar
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Today the Australian perfume Junkies are thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with Saskia Wilson-Brown, the founder of the LA based Institute for Art and Olfaction. Winners are listed HERE<<<JUMP
Saskia, what led you to the idea of an Institute for Art and Olfaction?
I was interested in perfumery, and I was hoping to learn about perfume, but was unable to travel to France or the UK for an extended period of time. So I thought, well, why not set up a space to learn here in LA? That, and I also wanted to see how to incorporate scent into a fine arts context- which ultimately I felt there was little support for. In other words, I set it up for fairly selfish reasons, but also because I felt that it was a travesty that creative people didn’t have access to this very creative medium. I felt like if my artist friends knew what could be accomplished with scent, they’d use scent in their practices. And then there was a bit of the egalitarian in me that railed at the inaccessibility of it all.
How has your background as an artist, filmmaker and independent producer shaped the development of the IAO?
I think it has helped inasmuch as being an outsider to the perfume industry has allowed me to approach it in a way that makes sense for other outsiders. Having said that, it’s been an extremely steep learning curve, and knowing now how little I knew then, it was a bit naive and/or gutsy of me. Sometimes, though, that’s an advantage, no?
Do you consider your primary function at the Institute to be that of an educator, an impresario/promoter, an artist or something else?
Probably more of impresario/promoter aka cat-herder. I try to bring in people more qualified than I am to oversee the education and do the art projects. On an oblique but related note: The difference between being a producer and being a production assistant is merely a question of perception.
Scent as performance art has become a popular means of artistic expression. Scent infused video/art installations, stories told with fragrance, dance and music as well as exhibits of colors and odors are among the many interdisciplinary projects that include olfaction. What kind of innovations do you see the IAO bringing to this already crowded stage? Are there any collaborative projects on the IAO horizon?
We just finished a big project where we recreated a failed scent concert from 1902 by a man called Sadakichi Hartmann, so we’re well aware of the history for this trend – it goes back a long way. Just check out the research being done around scent obsession in the Victorian era! The most maddening thing to me is when people call themselves innovators when the very idea they are proposing has been tried a hundred times, for a hundred years. It just shows them to be bad at research, and maybe a little too good at self-promotion.
So – knowing that, being VERY aware of how little what we do can truly be called innovative – we’re very careful not to bandy those big words around, and not to overstate what we do. However, we are keen to support people who we feel use scent in their practices in a meaningful and conceptual way – and are on the lookout for truly innovative ideas.
A big challenge for us is finding projects that get beyond the gimmick of scent, and truly reach something that rises to the realm of high concept, fine art, the human condition, or the outer fringes of technology or philosophy. Luckily, there are some incredibly talented people out there, some of whom we are working with already and some of whom we are keen to work with. Nothing we can announce just yet, unfortunately.
(Azar: I have to interject here that I absolutely agree! As a part of the 1980s performance art scene I was aware that a lot of what we did was simply offer a 20th century perspective on the work of earlier artists and poets, in particular the French Symbolists. In those day, though, the grant money seemed to flow in direct proportion to the number of disciplines we could involve and the amount of moral or cultural outrage we could elicit. It is so refreshing to see that your approach is so much more honest and truly artistic.)
There has been flurry of interest this spring surrounding Le Laboratoire’s development of the “oPhone” by Dr. David Edwards. The “oPhone” and a projected “olfactory social network” will launch on July 10. What kind of applications could you imagine for this device or for an “olfactory social network”? What role, if any, would this kind of technology play in future IAO projects?
It’s all very exciting! Technology will of course play a vital role in future projects, but – again – functional technology is one thing, but the concept underpinning it is the crux of the issue, for us. We hope to get to the place where the projects we work on/with access something beyond the tools they make use of. Put another way, if all you ever did was make paintings about the fact that you were able to paint, or cooked food that merely demonstrated the fact that you were able to cook food… Well… It would get boring.
There is MORE>>>>> Later today Azar talks to Saskia Wilson-Brown about the Institute for Art and Olfaction Awards 2014.
Australian Perfume Junkies 