Olfaction Exhibition

Co-mingling: A Fragmented Aromatic Inventory of an East London Street Market
6x pieces of text

Alex Rhys-Taylor is a visiting tutor and doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His work, largely literary-sociological writing, focuses on the relationship between aroma, flavour and social formation within East London. For ‘Olfaction’ he has submitted ‘Co-mingling: A Fragmented Aromatic Inventory of an East London Street Market,’ a meditation on the constraints and potentials of representing aroma with text.

Aversions and attractions to aromas have long been associated with the demarcation of social strata and the reproduction of cultural boundaries. Paradoxically the act of smelling bears a number of characteristics which also make it central to processes of identity-blurring, improvisation and social reconfiguration. Aromas have a degree of mobility, a potential to drift on breezes, osmose up concentration gradients and to creep beyond the controls governance. Accordingly they ascribe unique nuances to experience that the other senses do not. New relationships between bodies and smells are both wittingly and unwittingly developed in cities, and social formations within the aromatic-urban have a related mutability. There is no greater demonstration of these processes than the vitality curated within the foggy aromascape of a street market in East London. Therein, by way of osmosis, multiple aromatic layers become everyday moments in the multitude of olfactory rhythms comprising the area’s social life. For ‘Olfaction’ I have presented fragments of such an aromascape. They are scattered across the art space reflecting the mobility of aromas in bustling urban space, either to be snuck upon by the flaireur, or to be chased down and swept up into her dilated nostrils.

‘Repeated/Differential Icons’

Medium: photography (printed on postcards)

The smell of Fish & Chips is something anybody born in Britain will be able to distinguish, blindly, from far away. It is part of British culture, and is embedded in British minds, as it is acquired at childhood, and follows people all there life. It becomes part of the subconscious. There is no need to “think” on it to recognise it. The same brain process happens with the classical images associated to “Fish & Chips”: the take-away boxes, which have replaced the oily newspaper, which lie on the streets of any British City / town / village.

Receiver Station 2009

Meduim: textile , wadding, oil of lily of the valley

with raising ovaries
and the cervixscent lily of the valley
uterus invites to informations marathon
reflecting limbic obedience