“I would like to capture the moment of exhaustion after a climax – the sense of space that’s left when feelings settle.” 

In TIMECAPSULE 7:32am (2019) scent designer Katharina Dubbick creates a room-filling installation with a scent distilled from her memories. It was produced in collaboration with Irish perfumer Meabh McCurtin in Paris and the chemical compound is distributed via steam into the nostrils to stimulate associations with sweat, saliva, cigarette smoke, sex, gin and tonic, latex, sticky skin and cleansing products. Casts of various bodies (a torso, underarm, belly and breast) are suspended in a mist, contributing to the heady mixture of emotions within the air, which could feel something like the sensation you get after sex, or at the top of a rave. 

Dubbick is an artist who studied on the Royal College of Art, but before that, she grew up in Germany and Sweden. She works with scent to conjure a multisensory experience. TIMECAPSULE 7:32am is a latest piece that forms a part of the show Pervilion at Silver Building, opening today in abandoned boiler rooms in Canning Town – an eerie space that is delivered to life through the scent – “an olfactory cloud”. The installation will dispense two scent formulations through industrial diffusers, one focused on body odour, the opposite on industrial fluids, allowing the mix to drift uncontrollably over the course of the show.

Below, we talked to Dubbick concerning the installation and the way, in an area crammed with visceral smells, you’re asked to rethink why we use fragrance to cover up our natural scents, and why there’s such thing pretty much as good and bad smells to start with.

How did you begin working with scent in your practice?
Katharina Dubbick: I actually have all the time been concerned about scent. There are such a lot of beautiful smells that we don’t concentrate to. The primary smells I got enthusiastic about were just around me in my each day life. Especially the natural smell of my boyfriend. It’s such a singular smell, it’s hard to place into words. I started to be concerned about enhancing people’s body odour. A turning point was collaborating in a contest to create a scent on the Royal College of Art, where I’m completing my MA in knitwear. I won first prize for my concept Soi-Meme: An Olfactory Self-Portrait and created the scent with the laboratories of International Flavors & Fragrances – a technical leap.

How does this relate to your wider practice and interests? 
Katharina Dubbick: In my design, I take a look at how the body shapes a garment and the way they interrelate. With scent, I try to disclose the body fairly than cover it up. Often people mask themselves with business fragrance – perfume or deodorant – which makes us smell the identical. I’m concerned about scent that enhances your individual odour. It’s about being true to yourself and being aware of the variety of smells around us. There is no such thing as a bad or good smell. Body odour is as unique as a fingerprint. It’s tied to emotions. Anxiety sweat, for instance, has a powerful, heavy smell in comparison with sweat after understanding – it expresses greater than we would have the option to say. 

Tell me concerning the collaboration with perfumer Meabh McCurtin…
Katharina Dubbick: Scent can hint at emotions that may’t really be put into words; that said, our collaboration challenged me to articulate my feelings in order that Meabh could discover the molecules. We began to construct an archive of smell molecules that relate to body odour with a view to create olfactory portraits. The archive was the premise for developing the scent for the brand new installation for Pervilion. Through dialogue, we got closer to pinpointing the chemical formulation of a selected memory. Meabh sends me an initial creation of the scent, and the discussion continues backwards and forwards over the phone. I test it on the skin and thru diffusers, to see how the scent reacts with the environment. I give feedback after which Meabh goes back to the lab to refine the scent in multiple stages. It takes time. 

Why the ‘moment of exhaustion after a climax’?
Katharina Dubbick: Dorothy Feaver, the curator of Pervilion, invited me to go to a brutalist constructing in central London, Welbeck Street Automotive Park, just before it was demolished. The basement was originally utilized by a department store to store fur. There was an intense atmosphere. Disused space is a mystery in a city during which behaviour is so regulated. There’s a bittersweet sense of possibility. This silent, empty structure jogged my memory of raw, post-industrial spaces in Berlin, where raves occur. It made me consider a moment at an after-party, the double-sided nature of delight and depletion. I desired to stimulate those sensations of pure abandonment. The sense of exhaustion after a climax. 

Time Capsule 7.32am evokes the sensations of a rave, where thumping beats push our bodies to bounce, break right into a sweat and be at liberty, loosening the ties to our each day lives. When the night is over, dancers leave feeling glad but empty at the identical time. It’s a combination of emotions that may’t quite be put into words. Scent is the most effective solution to express it.

What’s in it?
Katharina Dubbick: The scent is formed in two parts, ‘Latex’ and ‘Human’. The notes include sweat, saliva, sex, gin and tonic, cigarette smoke, latex, smoke machine, sticky skin and cleansing products – there are greater than 50 different molecules. The formula all the time stays secret to the perfumer. I’m diffusing it around a gaggle of leather body fragments which suggest different bodies coming together.

What’s the connection between scent and sculpture?
Katharina Dubbick: Like sculpture, scent occupies space, but additionally it is a time-based medium. It mixes with other smells, changes and decays. It doesn’t translate to the screen. It demands that you just engage within the moment and concentrate to the environment, fairly than blocking it out. I find it interesting to take smell out of context, from a moment at an after-party to the exhibition space. I’m intrigued to see how people respond. Some will relive a memory. Others will perhaps just recognise elements.

As a gaggle show how does this interact with the opposite works? 
Katharina Dubbick: There’s an issue throughout the Pervilion show – how does the body reply to the pressures of the built environment? My installation is closely related to a movie which was also a response to the subterranean stockroom, a collaboration between director Stella Scott and Dorothy Feaver. The film is inspired by the writing on the partitions left by employees. Stella’s camera connects the architectural skin with the surface of the body, performers rub against the partitions until they disappear into mist. My leather forged of my sister’s torso appears in the ultimate sequence, like a shed skin. That place is now gone, and you’ll be able to experience the sensations of the aftermath by respiration in my scent within the boiler room installation. There’s an idea of transformation of physical states and the emotional effect. Steam, tears, sweat – these physical expressions are manifest within the scent, visualised within the film, and metaphorically at play in Jack O’Brien’s sculpture.