In addition to my work as a researcher, I create non-commercial mixed media scent applications [note: ‘applications’ refer to a specific ‘class’ of products] for purposes of scholarly research and educational knowledge mobilisation, with a focus on the missing modality of aroma. My emphasis on the materiality of communicative learning modalities (such as aroma), rather than their sensorial effects, also reflects the distinction between learning with and through materials in an active practice of inquiry rather than the emphasis on physiological and affective (i.e., emotional) ‘responses’ to scent at the site of consumption. From the standpoint of production, of making (my orientation), a material is understood from the inside out. My practice begins with the materials and how they are understood through practice.

My (deliberately) indirect path to scent creation began with the development of the Aroma Inquiry Lab in 2013, which was initially intended as a mini archive and learning environment to explore aromatic materials insights developed during my doctoral field work studies of scent-themed interactions and practices of cultural mediation in Grasse, France and related explorations of smell walking/mapping. After defending my dissertation, I became interested in understanding some of the basic principles of perfumery as they applied to learning, starting with American perfumer Mandy Aftel’s self-study perfume workbook, which is a mini course in perfumery intended for beginners. Unlike many others who enrol in a perfume class, I had no intention of becoming a perfumer or starting a business; I was simply interested in understanding some of the basic foundations of learning the materials apart, such as odour study.

After I defended my doctorate, I enrolled in classes with Aftel at-home studio in Berkeley, where I had the opportunity to explore and create using Mandy’s incredible perfume organ and share this process of discovery with others whose path to this practice and interests were similar to my own. I later expanded on this foundation with study specific to the principles and practices of conventional fragrance creation, which is the path of a great many independent perfumers, including my teachers, who went about acquiring their knowledge of their craft through serious study of established texts, learning resources, industry databases, regulatory guidelines, additional materials-specific classes, and ongoing mentorship from a network of trusted peers also working in more technical mixed media (i.e., products containing both natural and synthetic raw materials) applications (i.e., this refers to the end products that a type of scent is developed to go into such as candles, air delivery systems, etc).

Drawing on my studies of perfumery and ongoing exploration of experimental and mixed-media (both synthetic and natural) applications, the specific applications (i.e., product class or format for scent creation) I work in are intended for learning, training, communication, and cultural mediation as objects to smell rather than wear. As my scent practice is ancillary to a more broad-based research program that extends to many other contexts of practice (and materials) beyond aroma, I refer to myself as a researcher-practitioner, rather than perfumer or so-called ‘olfactory’ artist. While my practice is, technically, perfumery, the applications I work in are very different from conventional fragrance products or artistic projects that are underwritten by olfactory claims (i.e., exposure to my work will trigger some sort of magical physiological or emotional response…). Instead, my work is intended as a call to aromatic context and as an opportunity to learn something about the qualities, properties, and provenance of the ‘stuff’ on the other side of the nose – and not just our ‘responses’ to those things.

It is this more grounded orientation to aroma as a tangible (although invisible) communicative modality that informs my orientation to my practice. From this perspective, we might learn how to decode and become fluent in the language of aroma as a communicative modality. From the standpoint of making, this extends to learning what a given material has to express and how it interacts with and transforms other raw materials, in contrast an impulse to inscribe ourselves over modality that is more spoken for than speaking.

To this end, I have developed original mixed media aromatic applications for scholarly knowledge mobilisation, conference workshops, prototypes, training, and exhibits. My work contains rare, hard-to-find, and unusual ingredients that are as original and truly one-of-a-kind and an opportunity for people to smell something that they would not otherwise have access to, and that doesn’t scale for commercial fragrance production. Even when I have a particular theme in mind, the most interesting work is developed in collaboration with my materials – rather than at them. As a woodworker must enter into the grain of the specific wood they are using, so too is composition contingent on a conversation with the properties, qualities, and characteristics of materials, rather than projecting ideas and concepts onto materials.

In collaboration with curators from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), I was commissioned to design, formulate, and compound four unique and historically themed scents for the epic Making Her Mark Exhibit, which you can read about in my interview with the AGO’s Foyer Magazine. I was later invited to re-develop five custom scents for the AGO’s multi-modal Art Cart, such as a whiff of Elvis for the gallery’s iconic Andy Warhol painting, ‘Elvis I & II,’ and four other scents inspired by the works of Mark Rothko, James Tissot, Tom Thomson, and Gustave Caillebotte that are featured in the gallery’s permanent collections. Most recently, I collaborated again with the AGO on two uniquely atmospheric scents for the exhibit David Blackwood: Myth & Legend. 

Learning with-and-through

As I have observed in my research, it is very difficult for the public to simply access aromatic materials for purposes of curiosity or open-ended exploration. Such opportunities are rarely available to non-specialists outside of the context of the commercial sale or marketing of sensory goods, and this is often by design. Accordingly, my research-informed orientation to practice doesn’t defer to a specific discipline or industrial focus, but an emphasis on the general knowledge, skills, and literacies required to know and do things with a range of related materials. I approach this from the standpoint of literacy at the site of production, rather than the conventional use-values of scent for disciplinary or industrial purposes. In my case, the applications of aromatic raw materials can serve a pedagogical purpose, for learning, literacy, and training, which calls attention to the specific properties and affordances of these materials as a communicative modality rather than a reflecting mirror for affect (alone).

My intentional use of the word aroma (rather than smell) reflects an ‘extra’ disciplinary view of learning beyond disciplinary silos and industrial power bases in terms of my interest in the material and environmental sources of odours (i.e., their properties, characteristics, qualities, sources, costs, provenance, etc). In contrast with the functional paradigms of smell, I am interested in the physical and material stuff on the other side of the nose. I am interested in both the properties and characteristics of aromatic materials along with the competences, skills, knowledge, and material contingencies  (i.e., time, labour, money, and so forth) required to access, learn about, and communicate with and through applied practice, rather than their affective, subjective, or physiological effects.

To learn with and through materials in practice is to acquire an understanding of scent from the inside out. This kind of orientation necessarily involves practical contingencies of time, labour, cost, practice, and access to knowledge of sourcing and using complex raw materials properly and safely. This is not only a distinction between modalities and sensations (i.e., sound versus hearing), but also the crucial differences between making and consuming.

As an academic whose creative practice is ancillary to a broad-based research program that extends to contexts of practice far removed from aroma, my orientation reflects a critical and pedagogical concern with the practical and on-the-ground contingencies required for the development of specific forms of literacy, competence, and skill that are constituted with and through materials. As I explain in my dissertation:

“in the absence of situated and informal inquiries into the ecological or material sources of odours, the story of smell is akin to a novel that takes place entirely within the mind of a protagonist, where external phenomena are reduced to their emotional or symbolic effects or interpretations within a mental “theatre of consciousness” (Gibson, 2015, xxii-xxiii). What is needed, is a call to aromatic context, that engages with ‘sense making’ through physical, tangible, multimodal and ecologically contingent ways of knowing that are grounded in inquiry, action and interaction rather than representations or theories about phenomena. Such an orientation, to the investigation of source and context as an activity of inquiry, rather than the acquisition or mastery of specialist knowledges, also reflects emancipatory philosophies of education as a form of informal “lifelong learning” (Williams, 1993)”  

My emphasis on the pedagogical affordances of aromatic materials also examines how the preoccupation with affect (i.e, emotional or hedonic ‘effects’ of scent) often serves to obscure the kinds of literacies, competences that can be used to interpret, decode, and communicate things in deliberate, fluent, and skilful ways. 

As I argue throughout my work, there is a gap in our attention to the environmental and material sources of odour in the world and of aroma as a modality that we can learn about from the inside out, rather than via indirectly acquired knowledge sources that are merely inscribed over these things.  This calls attention to the specific material, environmental, and structural contingencies of (aromatic) learning, communicating, and making that reside on the other side of the nose, such as the knowledge, literacies, competencies, skills, tools, and infrastructure required to learn and make things (safely) with aromatic materials in practice.

Scent in the Present Tense

My emphasis on the material basis of odours at the site of production, in contrast with their sensory effects at the site of consumption, also shifts attention to the expertise, savoir-faire, and metier of skilled practitioners such as cooks, sommeliers, chemists, and perfumers, whose competence is developed through regular interactions and practice with materials (beyond perceptual exposure alone). Indeed, if it were the case that applied mastery was merely an outcome of some self-diagnosed ‘innate’ talent, we would all be master perfumers and Michelin chefs. Yet in the absence of any focus on process, practice, or literacy, narratives of sensory exceptionalism continue to persist as a frequent trope in popular culture, media, and film, which can serve to obscure the time, labour, and practice that is (actually) required to correctly identify and characterise odours in practice and that is learned rather than ‘innate.’

There are many ways of understanding aroma from the inside out that are common to humans, plants, and other species that are fluent interpreters of chemical communication. In these contexts, chemical compounds are a resource for survival that requires almost continuous inquiry and exposure to interpret. This kind of learned skill can be trained in humans just as it is trained in our non-human companions, such as SAR and K-9 working dogs, to identify and track highly specific odours at thresholds well below the capacity of the human nose. 

Contrary to the popular myth that the primary significance of aroma is to ‘trigger’ emotional responses and memories, smell is most certainly not the ‘most’ powerful, or even effective, ‘cue’ for memory. In fact, scientific studies of olfactory-cued memory against other modalities found much stronger recall for visual cues, such as photographs (see Avery Gilbert’s What the Nose Knows, for an accessible, funny, and non-specialist explanation of the science of smell). The reality is, true olfactory ‘triggered’ memories are actually far less frequent and rarer than marketers (and journalists) might have us believe, but are also immediate, jarring, often unwanted, and sometimes, even traumatic. And like all memories, “subject to fading, distortion, and misinterpretation” (Gilbert, 2014, p.208).

The much-celebrated (but scientifically unfounded) Proustian trope, apart from its purposes as a literary device, is actually much closer to a laboured attempt at “recollection” (Gilbert, 2008) than an olfactory-triggered memory. But the Proustian trope also highlights the fetish of smell as a prompt for inscription, rather than an opportunity for learning or characterisation and by extension, the potential for critical assessment, evaluation, and scrutiny of ‘sensory’ goods. These critiques also reflect the limitations of behaviourist stimulus-response theories that James Gibson long ago rejected and that continue to underwrite the faulty conceptual foundations of training schemes that rely on didactic transmission of indirectly acquired taxonomies that must be assimilated through outmoded systems of rote memorisation. While these systems may produce the appearance of mastery in the rehearsed performance of specialised terminology,  the accrual of second-hand knowledge is not interchangeable with the development of genuine competence that is constituted with and through materials in ongoing, usually daily, applied practice. 

In my research into the development of learning that occurs in applied and skilled contexts of aromatic practice involving the use of material resources, I have observed how our attachment to cherished myths, anecdotes, and debunked claims (that continue to enjoy circulation in the media and popular culture) serves to obscure the more grounded expertise of applied practitioners whose facts might serve to contradict consumer fictions. As I argue in my chapter for the book Design with Smell, we’re never going to move much beyond the inherently solipsistic relation to scent as a mere ‘playback device’ (Ingold, 2011) for memories and emotions until we can learn to smell in the present tense.

Mediating literacy

During my doctoral research field work in Grasse, I observed (and smelled) first-hand how the most meaningful and relevant uses of aroma in the context of curation, interpretation, and public education require a full-time staff of mediators to provide one-on-one tutored explorations of raw materials and living sources of odour. In contrast with the use of scent as a ‘cue’ or ‘prompt’ to talk about ourselves, the practices I observed were primarily oriented to generating understandings of the source, provenance, and properties of living and raw aromatic materials and the knowledge and know-how (savoir-faire) required to transform them.

In Grasse, the perfumery museum’s trained cultural mediators guided visitors through rooftop greenhouses and a multi-acre garden (run by the perfumery museum) and facilitated hands-on workshops. 

While I was initially curious about the scent devices before my research, my dissertation ultimately became an extended critique of device-driven approaches to scent features and the problems with poorly designed devices (that either absorb or mute the costly compounds inside, or else require almost continuous maintenance and malfunctions) and ultimately a call to aromatic context and the vital role of mediators in cultural heritage.

As I explain in my dissertation, there are many problems with leaving it to a device (or static novelty scent feature) to mediate a meaningful visitor experience with aroma. As I frequently observed, visitors rarely had any sense of what to do with the machines, their relevance to the collection, or any awareness of the skilled practices of sniffing. Yet when these same devices were scaffolded by the mediators, the visitor experience was much more interesting and meaningful, as the guides would not only provide important context but also help visitors make personal connections and compare their impressions with others on the tour. 

Scent beyond the sensory side-show

While the use of aroma in galleries and museums isn’t new, the preoccupation with delivery devices, novelty scents (i.e., gross-out theme park pongs), and gimmicky display formats continues to grab headlines. Indeed, almost weekly, there is another media story declaring that aroma is being used “for the first time” in stories about the use of corporate fragrance technologies in public and institutional spaces, which Canadian curator Jim Drobnick accurately characterises as “high precision air fresheners” (Drobnick, 2006). As my colleagues and I argue in our paper Beyond Vapourware: Considerations for Meaningful Design with Smell (McBride et al, 2016), the entire conceit of scent technology is itself a type of vapourware, underwritten by bold claims from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and human-computer interaction.

My work also implicitly (and often explicitly) critiques the preoccupation with devices and gimmicky display formats as an extension of the commodity culture paradigms of fragrance. The emphasis on display mirrors an industrial emphasis on packaging, rather than the quality or safety of the mixtures inside. The notion that merely adding a scent feature will (magically) ‘trigger’ physiological or emotional response doesn’t advance our understanding of aroma, as the institutional, cultural, or commercial proponents and benefactors of neuro-centric claims (of learning, perceiving, and creating).

By and large, the typical use case for the imposition of behavioural fragrance devices found in hotels, retail, and entertainment spaces is to promote and sell scent delivery technologies. This inherently aggressive format is not only unethical (we can’t choose not to breathe) – but also potentially a source of long-term contamination to the built environment (and everything within it). These devices rely on the most inexpensive, yet highly tenacious, aromachemicals that are primarily designed for industrial applications such as fabric softeners that are literally created to embed themselves into upholstery, clothing, along with many other places (like our hair, skin, and endocrine system) where these molecules really don’t belong. 

These issues call attention to the significance of relevant and research-informed design principles specific to aroma. Given the high costs and long development time required to develop, formulate, test, compound original and highly technical scent applications properly and safely, it is therefore crucially important that this process begins with careful and critical examination of the particular ‘claims’ (and their corresponding benefactors) that underwrite ones selected ‘concepts’ and the degree to which these concepts either reinforce or challenge the usual tropes and conceits that are most often associated with appeals to neuroscientific authority. As I argue in my thesis and my chapter in the book Design With Smell, aroma can be engaged in more serious and pedagogical terms and regarded as a form of literacy that gives context and meaning to the world around us if only we could re-situate scent beyond territorial disputes between disciplines, industries, and their benefactors.  

A focus on (high-quality) materials

It is this more materially grounded understanding of scent as a tangible (although invisible) form of information and a communicative modality that can contribute to context and literacy that inspires my own approach to scent creation and its use for cultural mediation. To this end, I have developed original mixed-media scents (i.e., natural and synthetic) for scholarly knowledge mobilisation, conference workshops, prototypes, training, and exhibits. While I do not manufacture commercial products for the consumer market, my work involves many of the same practices as professional perfumers, including compliance with regulatory guidance on safe limits for fragrance creation. 

In 2024, I collaborated with the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) to design, formulate, and compound four unique and historically themed scents for the AGO’s epic Making Her Mark Exhibit, which you can read about in my interview with the AGO’s Foyer Magazine. Later, I was asked to re-develop five custom scents for the AGO’s multi-modal Art Cart, such as a whiff of Elvis for gallery’s iconic Andy Warhol painting, ‘Elvis I & II,’ and four other scents inspired by the works of Mark Rothko, James Tissot, Tom Thomson, and Gustave Caillebotte that are featured in the gallery’s permanent collections. Most recently, I collaborated with the AGO on two more scents for the exhibit David Blackwood: Myth & Legend. 

My scents contain rare, hard-to-find, and unconventional ingredients that are truly one-of-a-kind and intended to honour, rather than upstage, the artefacts they accompany. Given that I make use of many natural materials that do not scale for commercial production and also require extensive testing and special formulation software to ensure they fall within the regulatory limits, but also offer visitors an opportunity to experience materials that are very different from the corporate smellscape.

In the case of natural materials I use, these are drawn from real environments, such as seaweed from the North Atlantic or fine pine absolute from Canadian trees, that can provide an authentic link to a particular environment, person, temporal period, or object many of us would not ordinarily have the opportunity to smell. I also make use of many fine man-made synthetic molecules and compounds that are often more realistic than some of their all-natural counterparts.

Even when I have a particular theme in mind, the most interesting work is developed in collaboration with my materials, just as a woodworker must enter into the grain of the specific wood they are using, so too is composition contingent on a conversation with the properties, qualities, and characteristics. As my mentors have often pointed out, the materials are actually our best teachers and will talk back to the projection or inscription of conceptual ‘ideas’ that fail to meaningfully engage with the possibilities and challenges of a given ingredient or composition.