Martynka Wawrzyniak draws upon personal perspectives by the exploring primal, multi-sensory aspect of human experience. An example of this was “Eau de M”, in which the Polish-born conceptualist took out an advert in the 2014 issue of Harper’s Bazaar featuring a scratch and sniff panel of fragrance based on her bodily scent. Inspired by the sense of smell, Wawrzyniak’s work is an investigation into the silent systems of communication created by the pheromones and chemicals our bodies emit. Speaking from her home in New York, she tells Sleek about how this sensation has influenced her life and work.
SLEEK: You have worked with a range of media, but how do you describe your practice?
WAWRZYNIAK: I am a conceptual artist. The medium is driven by the idea, the medium comes second. I come up with my ideas first and then the medium is determined by the best way to translate the concept back into the world in the form of art.
Often by utilising yourself.
The themes of my conceptual practice are focused on human nature and our connection to our primal sensual selves. I am interested in communicating in a way that can be viscerally and sensually experienced. I live my life and I experience the world around me and process it, and then I find a way to regurgitate a thought or an idea back to the world and present it from a new perspective. In the same way a mother bird eats and regurgitates food back to her babies. My practice operates simply by me living life, absorbing it, processing it and regurgitating it back in the form of an idea, in an execution that is assimilated by the audience viscerally.
‘I find a way to regurgitate a thought in the same way a mother bird eats and regurgitates food back to her babies’ – Martynka Wawrzyniak
Mouth, 2014, granulated sugar, water, corn syrup, 9 x 6.35 x 6.35 cm
I find your work to be quite personal and intimate.
It is very personal. My work is really my life. I use myself and my experiences as a source inspiration and source for ideas, and quite often also as a medium. It is kind of like a daily performance piece. For example, my “Feed” show, which was exhibited in 2014, consisted of a daily performance practice. Every day for three hundred and sixty-five days I created a meal that I then ate and stained a cloth dinner napkin with. “Feed” was a daily performance presented in the form of imprints that represented my experiences. I wanted to create a self-portrait through the blemishes of my life lived. It is very primal; it is the stain left behind, the stain of an experience. The napkins were later sewn together in chronological order by month into two five hundred square foot interlocking suspended spirals. I used to do more photographic, self-portraits and performances videoing myself and then I decided to step out of the frame. I wanted to create a self-portrait completely devoid of any visual prejudice.
This was also your aim with your “Smell Me” project.
With “Smell Me”, I wanted to create a purely visceral self-portrait of a woman, to capture her pure essence. Metaphorically you could liken it to a spiritual essence. The biological essence of your scent is literally molecules that are chemicals that are emitted by your body that can be physically analysed. But at the same time you could liken it to the aura of your spiritual or emotional essence.
It took me a long time to find out how I could extract my own essence. I was very lucky to come across an amazing professor at Hunter College who was super excited by the idea and gave me a research team. I literally signed up to be a chemistry student for a year and I worked with a team of students. I had to fully immerse myself in the chemistry of scent extraction and then learn all about the fragrance industry for the second part where my scent was synthesised by a nose and perfumer in a fragrance house. And then I created an advertisement for Harper’s Bazaar with a designer who had actually worked on the Armani and Calvin Klein advertisements that I was referencing.
How did you approach the magazine?
I always wanted to do this part of the project but it took quite a while to get the funding for it. I wanted it to be in one of the most mainstream fashion magazines available in the United States, but also a classy one. I was treated like a regular client and bought an advertisement. They didn’t treat it like an art project. I wanted it to be in both the subscriber issue and available at the newsstand, in every single copy of the million copies printed. I delivered ready-made inserts that they inserted into the magazine.
What was really interesting for me was to bring art outside of the art world cathedral and beyond white cube gallery context, to subversively deliver both my scent and the scent of a human which is the antithesis of fragrance, and my art project to the masses for consumers to literally inhale without realising they are experiencing art. Sort of like force-feeding. I kind of liken it to guerrilla terrorism.
Enfleurage (Still) (Face), 2011, c-print, 50 x 86.3 cm, edition of 5
You were entering the consumerist system with your art project.
“Smell Me” part was art commenting on commerce, and then presented in the form of the “Eau de M” advertisement in Harper’s Bazaar it went full circle back to being disguised as commerce. Art is fed to consumers in the form of commerce which is a medium that is familiar and very easy for them to digest.
Can you discuss the process of arriving at the final scent?
We extracted many, many samples of my exercise and sleeping sweat, my tears, and my hair in the laboratory at Hunter College. These are organic essential oils from my body which contain my DNA. I later chose ten of these essences to sell as “art objects”; they were presented in tear shaped glass vials with hand blown glass stands. I selected three of my favourites from each scent: exercise sweat, hair, tears, and one night shirt sweat, and later had them synthesised by working with nose Dawn Goldworm and the perfumer Yann Vasnier. In order to have an interactive element in the exhibition, I diffused these synthesised scents in a scent chamber which was a room that people entered individually and literally inhaled the artist.
But also quite subjective.
It is very subjective. The three of us smelled together, myself, the nose, and the perfumer, and we pretty much agreed for the most part on the direction it went in. It was a joint effort. The synthesised formulas are made up of a mix of synthetic and natural essential oils. However, what I want to make clear is that this scent was extracted from my actual body. It is a recreation. I used exercise sweat for the “Eau de M” advertisement in Harper’s Bazaar because I thought that was most jarring, human scent of the four.
You mentioned earlier this notion of the primal, animalist element to smell. What fascinates you about scent in its ability to act as a communicator?
The sense of smell is our most primal sensual sense. The olfactory nerve in our nose is actually an extension of the brain, the only part of it which is outside the skull. It taps purely into our subconscious. When a baby is born the first thing they can do is smell their surroundings, before they can fully see. Our sense of smell is the most intense way of relating to the world and we take it for granted. There is a whole system of communication between human beings and animals that is created through pheromones and chemicals that our body emits as a form of communication. We ruin this experience by covering ourselves with various scented products. Our laundry powder, moisturiser and shampoo smells. And then we put on fragrances, lip gloss and deodorant. Most people probably have twenty different smells on their body at the same time.
Have you always been so fixated on the sense smell?
I have always been very driven by my sense of smell ever since I was a child. I was obsessively sensitive to scent and I still am. As a child I was very affected by the way people smelled. If somebody had a bad smell to me I couldn’t hang out with them. I used to find it really, really hard being in a crowd or in a bus with people that smelled bad. Smell has always been a huge part of my life. I can’t wear scents; I have to have everything unscented. Sometimes I pass someone on the street and I am completely attacked by their whole aura they are emitting. I am highly sensitive and in tune with my senses.
Text by Rachael Vance
Portarits by Benedict Brink
Taken from Sleek issue #48, available for purchase on our online shop now.