The Smell of Earth
The creation of the works for Aether began in and around my studio, a former orangery at Gunderslevholm Manor south of the town of Sorø, where I am surrounded by woods and a stream, the manor and the arboretum, the manor church, the fields and the sheep.
In my work I am interested in everything we can’t see. Everything that happens underground, the invisible networks: the humus, the organisms, the decomposition, the fungi, the world of insects and weeds. Everything we would prefer to avoid. The intervention of the atmosphere and its consumption of perishable material. Everything gets eaten in the end.
In my works for the exhibition, I have tried to interact with the cycle of nature and let the wind and weather affect the textiles, by burying them in the woods or the peat bog, submerging them in the stream and letting them be blown by the wind in the trees.
Like steam that rises from the Earth’s interior. Like when ‘mosekonen’, the folkloric bog woman, ‘brews’ the ground mist on the meadow next to my studio. That’s how I have conceived of the bright textiles for the exhibition. They rise like mist or steam down by the washing line, stretched from the rowan tree to the woodshed. There hang the works dyed with heather and cone sap, smelling of windblown bedlinen.
And the smells. I have tapped the oil/resin of the grand fir tree and let it form part of the olfactory image of the works. The thuja tree has a sharp smell and the bark oozes in the autumn, next to the cypresses. The smell of the earth is overpowering, like the smell of the spicey heather on the heath. Like the smell of sugar beet in season. The smell of a woodland floor in the autumn, where the leaves have begun to decompose into humus.
The Working Method
During a work residency at the Danish Art Workshops, I continued working with the weather-bitten textiles, had the opportunity to work on a larger scale, and worked with earth from five different locations around Gunderslevholm Manor. The textiles are dyed with cone sap, bark sap and heather.
Scent designer Lisbeth Jacobsen from Odorandfumes has created two smells for the works using natural ethereal oils. A dark, earth/wood smell for the dark materials, and a light, heavenly smell for the bright textiles. The grand fir oil which I tapped in the woods is part of both smells. Smells dark as the night and the humus and the soul of the world. Smells light as fog and mist — the heavenly light which the Platonists called the ether.