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The project, divided into three fragrances, digs deep into small pockets of the polish countryside. Taking from their surroundings the earth, bark, resin, mist, moss, fauna, and flora of these regions, to create a striking, if slightly blurry, impression of their mother regions. Perfumery, like fashion, is yet another industry that showed the inability to neatly apply industrial production onto craft and art. Companies which sought to sell their fragrances at scale, could not in turn afford to anchor their materials and sources in any one place, and so had to instead create a standardised palette of synthetic smells, which could be replicated anywhere. It’s only after that point, that a designer could play around with ‘creativity’. But any artist will tell you that choosing the materials decides half of the piece. And so by making the materials with which we work general lab made concepts like: ‘rose scented’, ‘citrusy’, ‘candy-like’, rather than actual specific smells ‘this kind of rose’ ‘the citrus tree by that garden’ ‘the candy of this region’, we strip them of context and limit the amount of different fragrances we can make. On the other hand, to pick from one of the three fragrances, a scent that belongs exclusively to the early-morning riverbank of a northwestern polish town; made in-part from the items and nature you’d find foraging there, has a definite story and is not something you could copy, even with all the syrups and extracts in the world at your disposal. As we constantly talk about in textiles as well: the collection, processing and finishing of the fibres that designers use is a whole other separate artform.
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