DANE 

On the floor in both rooms are these sort of isolated sculptural forms, and on top of them lie these very kind of delicate habotai silk prints. The forms themselves are sort of borrowed from an object called a fusego, which is used to infuse fabric such as bedding. But what lays on top of mine is this print of my 10-year-old iris.

So when I was 10, my mother took me to an iridologist. And, iridology is a kind of pseudo-medical body of knowledge and practice that suggests that you can map the body onto the iris to understand ailment elsewhere.

So it’s this kind of lovely idea that we talk about poetically: that the eye is the window to the soul. It’s another moment in which the iris is expressed as a sort of poetic device to think about our interior self and the way that we look outwards through the eye into the world … to think about the iris as a device for seeing, but also connected to smell through iris flowers being used in fragrance production.

Shall we head down to these two large, low concrete bases that support a whole kind of raft of technology and objects? 

So what we have here is the kind of operational heart of the work in many respects. What’s happening whilst we’re looking at this work is: each of these three objects – an umbrella, an iris flower, and a camera lens – each of them are having their fragrances – or perhaps, you know, their auras – kind of captured using a technology called headspace technology, which is developed by a company named Takasago that I worked with in Tokyo.

And headspace technology does this very beautiful thing where you can take an object and then trap those molecules rising off of it, and then – through gas chromatography and analysis and then reproduction – remake those smells in the laboratory. So that is what we have done for this exhibition.

On the wall hanging from these brass hooks are three etchings, and these etchings illustrate the molecular read from the headspace technology. So they show the breakdown of the molecules that were entrapped by what we see in the room on these two concrete slabs.

And these objects all have a kind of significance, or point towards the iris in other ways. There’s of course the iris flower, and then there is a camera lens.

A camera lens, of course, is connected to vision and seeing, and a functioning part of a camera lens is an iris. It’s an aperture that opens up and closes inside the lens – it’s another iris. 

And also it’s an Olympus camera lens, and Olympus is the mountain to which Iris, the goddess, was messenger. So it’s another connection towards ‘iris’. 

And then the last object, this umbrella, is called a janome, and that translates to snake eye. It’s a snake eye umbrella, and it’s been made to replicate the exact colour of my iris.

And [it’s] held by this glass dome, as are each of these forms, for their smell to be captured. And so in the first room, where you saw this turning, churning liquid – this perfume – that is the resultant liquid form from trapping and capturing the molecules rising off of these objects.

In spending more time with the work, I would suggest that you look closely and also remember that even when you’re not looking, you're sort of full of the work by way of the smell that is in the space and filling the space.

I really love this quote from Helen Keller, who wrote that smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.   

MOANA

Kia ora, Dane. And now I invite you to explore the artwork on your own. Take your time.