The Smell of Honey
Hum an installation by Alison Jones
Alison Jones, acclaimed visual artist, talks about her exploration of multisensory experience.
I started off as a painter. But in the middle of my BA degree at Camberwell School of Art, I started working with three-dimensional objects. These were hung compositions, which also worked in space. By the end of my degree in 1989, I became more interested in exploring real objects and simulating them through photography and Xeroxing, questioning illusion, reality and how we actually perceive the world. I was interested in our experience of looking at things that perhaps the natural eye doesn't perceive. I would home in on details of material to become aware of structures that we can't physically see.
My first major show was the New Contemporaries exhibition at the ICA in 1989 alongside Damien Hirst. I returned to London in 1993 to do my MA at Chelsea School of Art. It was at that time my work started to move away from two-dimensions and into the real space. I became interested in natural self-sustaining systems and how they go on regardless, and how man interferes with these systems. A lot of synthetic design is based on nature and its patterns. I researched into honeybees and their architecture, experimented with transferring honey into human space and architecture.
For my final MA show, I painted the four walls of a room at Chelsea with honey. I was initially fascinated by the intense amber glow, the tactile, sticky consistency of the material and the way it trickled down the walls. However, over the weeks of the exhibition the smell really hit me. It had started off sweet and sickly but soon became rancid with a smell that evoked men's urinals.
This made me aware of what a powerful sense smell is. It can involuntarily trigger memories and take us back to other times and places. I am particularly interested in the way we seem to have no control over this. I started looking for other strongly scented materials I could use to continue this research. The work became visually minimal. I was more interested in penetrating the subconscious rather than making the work visually exciting, because you can access this work even if you can't see it.
last updated: 2005-01-01 00:00:00
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tags : interview_profile visual arts tactile installation conceptual visual impairment