RAEWYN TURNER, 2008.
“Perfumes for Fear. No 1. Green”
Artist Pages from The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, ed. Brennan and Ballard, 2008.
Information gathered from the colour of the lush, enchanted and contaminated landscape of New Plymouth, New Zealand, was translated and transformed into a fragrance. Raewyn Turner’s concept of fragrance from the green palette is an investigation of the potential of smell as a cross-sensory indication of information about people, their emotional and physical states and their local environment. Turner collected 400 colours of green from Mt Taranaki and the 245T contaminated site around Paritutu. She digitally sampled these and made them into an animation to show commercial perfumer, Louise Crouch. While she was in the process of working with Crouch during 2002, Turner discovered that the perfumer has synesthesia. Synaesthesia is where stimulation in one sense is simultaneously involuntarily experienced in another. Louise has a consistent colour association with numbers and letters of the alphabet that assists her memory of around 200-300 perfumery materials she uses to create odour combinations to formulate perfumes for the commercial market. Louise offered a toilet-cleaner of fragrance which synesthetically matched the collection of colours.
