Impossible Scents

Posted in Artist's Journal by Jonathan on the May 5th, 2008

nose File this under the “Completely Unrelated” department but I find this kind of artwork simply fascinating. The artists have (no doubt) painstakingly recreated and/or invented scents of things as varied as ancient (Ptolemaic) Egyptian perfumes to the recent destruction of Mir.

“There’s also some extinct flowers,” adds Blackson. “Some have been gone for hundreds of years, whilst others have only been extinct for the last 30, due to things like deforestation.”

These scents were devised by James Wong, a botanist at Botanic Gardens Conservation International. “Resurrecting the scent of an extinct plant may seem like something straight out of ‘Jurassic Park’, but the dynamics of the operation are relatively simple, ” he says.

If your travels take you to England before June 9th, make a point to go see this and experience it in person. I wouldn’t count on finding these at your local perfumer.

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The Daguerreotype: Contemporary work by Jonathan Danforth

Impossible Scents

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