CATCHING A WHIFF - OLFACTORY ECOLOGIES
Lowana-Skye Davies, Keith Armstrong, Tessa Bergan, Merinda Davies, Bella Deary, Adrienne Kenafake, Tom Lyons, Amelia Mcleish, Hira Sheikh, Lillian Whitaker
24 - 28 March 2022
CATCHING A WHIFF - OLFACTORY ECOLOGIES is an invitation to dive nose-first into the fragrant atmospheres of 9 artists that care deeply for the survival of this precious multi-species planet.
“Smell is evidence of the existence of another within ourselves” (Tsing, 2015)
Catching a Whiff is a site-responsive, olfactory installation activated by bodies in space. The project invites local artists and audiences to engage in practices of smell walking, odour-wheel making, and site-responsive olfactory installation art. Like sounds, smells echo across landscapes - merging worlds and blurring atmospheres of multi-species cohabitation. The project investigates how humans, animals, chemicals, plants, temperature, weather, and ideas influence and interact with local smellscapes through participatory actions of smellwalking, smell mapping, odour-wheel-making, and olfactory art practice.
Considering the vast scientific evidence for impending ecological collapse, this exhibition of new olfactory artworks draws on the power of smells to reclaim space. In doing so, the works aim to softly hold space for our affections, rituals, and grievances for oceans, airs, soils, bodies, bees, and trees.
Human activity has and will continue to be inextricably intermeshed within multi-species atmospheres. Rising temperatures and anthropogenic pollutants are causing widespread disruption to the chemosensory communication systems that help ecologies to function in these atmospheres. The exhibiting artists consider their own olfactory ecologies through the development of new artworks engaging the perspective smells to ignite our senses, breathe life into the urban wilderness, and bring us back into our bodies. Each scented object proposes radically different ways of being with, thinking with, and smelling with one another on this incredibly diverse multi-species planet.
The curation has also been informed by intersectional feminist approaches to environmental justice in a networked, web-like model that considers the intersecting issues of capitalism, colonialism, racism, classism, queerphobia, transphobia, and ecophobia. In a time of global uncertainty, this approach seeks peace for living things. Together, the works seek health for all bodies that breathe life into this precious planet.
IN | artist run initiative and the Catching A Whiff Creative Team acknowledge the Kabi Kabi, the Gubbi Gubbi, the Yugumbeh, the Turrbal and Yuggera people as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this work was made. We recognize the continuing connection to lands, waters, and communities of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We acknowledge the people, creatures, and spirits of the lands that we have lived on and will live on. We pay our respects to Elders: past, present, and emerging.
CURATOR
Lowana-Skye Davies | @lowanaskye | www.lowanadavies.com
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Adrienne Kenafake | IG @adriennekenafake
Amelia Mcleish | IG @ameliajmcleish
Bella Deary | IG @bella_frances
Hira Sheikh| IG @hirassheikh
Keith Armstrong | IG @embodiedmedia
Lillian Whitaker | IG @lillianwhitaker.art
Merinda Davies | IG @merinda_davies_
Tessa Bergan | IG @zingerburgster
Tom Lyons | IG @tjclyons
PROJECT PARTNERS
IN | artist run initiative, City of Gold Coast, SITUATE
