Four years ago, I moved to Ireland. Because of ‘lineage,’ the Republic had already furnished me papers and rights equal to that of anyone born on the island. However I hadn’t nostalgia for Ireland - only resonating murmurs from past visits and Christmastime grumblings. Four years and I still straddle the fissure between two states: ‘immigrant’ and ‘repatriated.’I traverse this divide by familiarising myself with the language of my environment. This started as a situationist familiarisation, but evolved into a Proustian archival exercise: extracting and distilling aromas from any available material, rapidly filling my memory reservoir with the missing sensory stimuli, while simultaneously creating a material library of Irish aromas. My practice draws from my decade-long career in avant-garde kitchens, where I learned to extract perfumes for luxurious plates and sommelier training. I saw potential in the ‘de-luxification’ of aroma, recognising its capacity to incite articulation through uncodified, highly creative and, oftentimes, visually referential means.I currently explore aroma as a material of resonating communication, crafting distillates, extracts, and infusions from materials found around Ireland, such as jasmine from Glasnevin, cedar from Sligo, fruit gums from a newsagents, and slurry from Meath. I work somewhere between science and craft, exploring the theory and the apparatus of the perception of space.
