Invisible Languages: Scent and Sensory Storytelling
Frank Bloem, olfactory artist
Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Galleries, Level 0
Monday 27 July at 1.30pm
Free event, no booking required
Olfactory artist Frank Bloem (NL) will give a talk on working with scent as an art form. He will discuss the creative challenges of olfactory practice, how presenting scent differs from presenting visual art, and share examples from his past work.
Frank will also speak about his collaboration with Siobhán McGibbon on the installation Decomposition is Devotion and the Land Longs for You at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. For the installation, Siobhán and Frank developed a series of scents that move between the language of therapy, including terms such as gaslighting, triggering and attachment, and the love language of decomposition.
Audiences will be invited to experience scents from Frank’s practice, alongside additional scents developed during the collaboration that are not featured in the exhibition.
Frank Bloem is an artist who uses scent as his primary medium. He studied Fine Arts at the Rietveld Academy. In the summer of 2016, Frank changed his focus from visual art to olfactory-based works. He started The Snifferoo, a perfume laboratory and a place for education and experiments in the realms of scent. This led to various commissions from personalised perfumes to the recreation of elephant smells for the Amsterdam Zoo.