Dr Jo Burzynska is a New Zealand-based sound artist, wine writer, researcher and curator. Her work in these areas has increasingly converged in the production of multisensory art and the design of immersive environments – we talk to her about what she’s up to at the moment…
You do so many things it’s hard to categorise you as one thing or another – would you say you are primarily a multi media artist?
That’s kind of how I describe myself – I have been branching out over the last 15 years and really bringing a lot of strands together – as well as my background in experimental music and sound, I have a background in wine, and so I’m bringing it all together to make work which incorporates taste, smell and sound – into a multi-sensory experience.
What’s been your road to getting here? You started with sound and branched out into scent?
I realised what we hear, smell and taste were interacting with each other. We’re multi-sensory beings and so what we hear influences our sense of taste and smell. I find that really exciting and which spurred me to start combining sound with other senses and now this has become central to my creative practice.
Have you always used sound in your work?
In recent years, I’ve increasingly concentrated on making olfactory art, after I did a residency in Los Angeles at the Institute for Art and Olfaction, which focuses on helping artists to incorporate scent into their work. The way we encounter and conceptualise sound and scent is comparable, and so I now regularly combine the two in audio olfactory installations.
It makes sense to combine the two things, given that scent and sound can really provoke memory and feeling.
Unfortunately poor old scent has been undervalued as a creative medium. People think about scent as being primarily about perfume. Western culture hasn’t taken scent seriously, and yet it’s such a driver of memory and emotion. The way that the sense of smell works means its information is relayed directly to the limbic system, a brain region associated with memory and emotional processes. It can be much more evocative than sight or hearing, and when you put scent and sound together it can be very powerful.
Given that scent is so personal and evokes such personal memories – how are you able to make it accessible to everyone? Are there scents, for instance, that everyone will recognise and react to?
There’s enough commonality. I conducted a lot of research in my PhD into how sound and smell work together and found many shared effects these produce on wider groups of people. For example, the smell of lemon, which when associated with sounds is connected by most people to higher pitches.
But do people perceive them in a similar way?
Everyone senses things slightly differently, be it using sight or smell. Even though our sense of smell is so strongly connected with individual experiences, the way we perceive smells means there is some universality. While smells can powerfully trigger personal memories, they can be used to convey a wider range of ideas. Many cultures are just so visually dominated, they don’t take time to linger on smells longer than to judges them as being pleasant or unpleasant. Pay them more attention, for example when used as an artistic medium, and they have much more to impart than when are interactions with them are limited to immediate emotional judgment.
Commonality like the smell of cut grass or the sound of a minor chord?
So while some sensory responses appear hardwired, other experiences of smells and sounds can be influenced by culture. There may be elements of the sensory perception of the smell of cut grass and a minor chord that are widely shared, but filtered by culture these will resonate differently depending on whether or not you’ve grown up in Western cultures were these would be familiar. I’m really interested in looking at how different cultures experience sounds and smells. Peoples’ culture really shapes them – the food they eat, the music they listen to – and so I’m very interested in exploring that. Smells have actually been used against people – like the smell of people’s food. It can have a racist element to it.
Tell me about the olfactory portraits you do…
I did an exhibition at the Blue Oyster in Dunedin where I created portraits in scent of different people. They all had different cultural backgrounds and you could go to the portrait and smell the scents individually. The question I was asking was; Could we understand each other better if we inhaled other people’s scent memories.
Is olfactory art growing in popularity?
It is. Thankfully our sense of smell is being taken more seriously. Olfactory art is growing internationally. For example the Korean Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale contains olfactory art. But it’s been quite slow in New Zealand. There’s an underlying suspicion in Western culture as the sense of smell was traditionally “low” sense, compared to vision that has been placed at the top of the hierarchy. The dominance of Western culture in Aotearoa means there hasn’t been much olfactory art being made here.But when people do come to the exhibitions they respond to it and can intuitively understand it. There are probably only three other people working actively in this area. I’d like to see more. It’s difficult, the materials available here are limited, I have to get materials from overseas and I distil my own materials so I can work with my own environment.
What else are you up to at the moment?
I’m going to Lisbon next month and I’m presenting my work at the experimental scent summit – I’m really excited about that to be able to share my work in such an amazing space and to find out what other olfactory artists are doing. Then when I’m back I will be starting to write a book on my research on sensory interactions in what I term “crossmodal art” for Routledge.
What scent would you associate with Ōtautahi?
I have made a scent called Eau Tautahi – it’s a perfume that has a fresh, watery note with urban notes of construction dust, tarmac and dust and infused with coffee. Also being the garden city – there’s greenery and trees in the perfume as well. It’s currently for sale in the Christchurch Art Gallery Design Store.
If you had to design an olfactory portrait for yourself what would it be?
I have recently, as part of my exhibition at Ashburton Gallery, created a perfume that’s really three perfumes exploring the frequency range – I wear this a lot now. In perfume you have base notes, mid notes and top notes – which is similar to how we conceptualise music – so with this scent, I created three perfumes that resonated with low sounds, mid sounds and high pitched sounds.