Presenting a contemporary snapshot of the huge variety of approaches, materials and processes employed by The London Group artists. Edited by Sandra Crisp LG
Sandra Crisp LG: “The Group’s first introduction to your art was during The London Group Open 2023, Copeland Gallery, London while you were still studying MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths. ‘Lean In’ a mixed media installation of clay, rubber and vapour-distilled scent delves into themes of identity and the body, and was awarded The Vic Kuell Memorial Prize for Innovation.
“Your artist’ talk at Copeland mentioned body knowledge and how we process scent directly in the limbic system and only after that is it rationalised, making it different to other human senses. Overall, exploring emotional attachments with an intention to make work that is ‘felt’. A growing archive of diverse collected scents includes moss from Deptford Creek, laundry, clothing, food and that taken from your mother’s neck, with sculptural forms providing a direct way for the audience to interact with these.
“It will be really interesting to hear about your work in more detail and the way you explore scent using sculptural and installation processes.”
For a long time I tried to find a recipe for a process, a series of steps that could be repeated over and over to create a practice. With time I came to realise that process for me is not linear but unplanned, never straightforward. It comes from a massive accumulation of failures, of unexpected results. Some works have been simmering for years and are built and destroyed around research and many works were thoughts I had one morning that I could not seem to get out of my head and, some are just futile repetitions of a gesture in an attempt to inch closer to the ‘felt’. This has always been true for both my sculpture and writing practices. They both grow from never-ending notes accumulated on a wall, a notebook or a screen, lost and found many times around. Thinking of process means staring at that wall and picking it apart, a map of the places through which my hand, my nose and my mind wander.
On the studio wall there is a small flask; it is attempt 24 at finding my grandfather’s scent. I was showering eight years ago and as soon as I turned off the water the whole room smelled like my grandfather who passed away when I was 12. There are 68 failed attempts so far, 24 was the closest I got.
I tried to put together shampoo and coffee, to distill the humidity of the shower, to add the smell of leather or any other element that could help me recreate him or rather, recreate that moment when the shower turned off which left nothing of him besides his smell; I tried to find a recipe for him, how he dressed, where he sat, what he ate while also looking for the recipe for that shower, hoping somewhere in the middle I would find his scent.
After the shower I began to look at smell more closely. I studied how it behaves in the brain, how it gives access to emotional memory and began to focus in on it as a mediator, a way for our bodies to feel. It was a long research process into the science and behavior of scent that was layered onto research into techniques of extraction, distillation and the molecule-based construction of smells.
On the studio wall I have test samples, jars with strings and scent strips tied to one end that act as a journal of scents at work or scents that are waiting to find an object or gesture to make sense of them. Right now there are four jars: one is the smell of my bedsheets, one the smell of steamed milk, one is ruda (an Ecuadorian herb used a lot in herbal medicine) and the last one is the bottom of a wooden drawer.
In the beginning I focused on distilling scents tied to nostalgia and emotional memory. I was doing a residency at the contemporary art museum in Quito (Centro de Arte Contemporaneo) Ecuador and invited people to come and distill with me or to donate either objects or descriptions of scents to be distilled. This turned into an archive that now holds 87 scents including the smell of my mother’s hug. Now I look at smell beyond solely the nostalgic, instead focusing on how it’s a way to create discomfort, to invite touch, to construct intimacy and dislocate place.
On the studio wall there is also a clear piece of tracing paper that when scratched smells like the bottom of my grandmother’s purse. It is the first successful result of 34 attempts at developing a technique for making scratch and sniff walls. To the left there are a couple of versions of the piece: ‘drag your hand along me, smell your fingers’, one in wax and one in wood. Below those is the first pump mechanism design that eventually became the work ‘lean in, press me, breathe’ (also there, to its left). These pieces, developed around the same time, are the first ventures into understanding objects and scent as one. The visual language around them stems from giving time for objects and scents to grow in parallel, to have conversations. However, ultimately these are all exercises in looking at gesture.
All these objects and scents depend on a body to reach out and occupy them, to scratch, press, lean, sniff or feel. There is an intimacy, a vulnerability in that touch. A large part of this process has consisted of looking at how people approach them: the nervous discomfort when they drag their fingers on a piece of wood that smells like bed sheets and then look around to see if anyone is looking before they put their fingers to their nose and smell them, the confused scratching of a white wall that asks to you to come closer and sniff it, close enough to whisper a secret.
The studio wall is covered in scores, written or drawn, that look at the body of the audience as much as that of the work. Scores for me are a mix between choreographic scores, looking at movement through a space and pacing, and dialogue scores that I do for my job where I design and organise art theory classes. The result of staring at gestures and my daily job became the scores covering the wall, some are maps with keys to read gestures, pauses and pacing, others are a series of instructions, recipes of sorts and many are just hypotheses of interaction and their many changes or failures.
Many times the scores are the result of making a work and looking at it being touched, of testing the way in which body and object interact. In this sense they become studies of gesture that continue to build a physical vocabulary for the work. Sometimes however, the scores come before the work, like the ones on the right hand side of the studio wall that propose how bodies could revolve around and stop in front of ‘Palma que Camina’: do they lean? Do they crouch? How much time passes in between? From the 6 possibilities mapped out, none played out in reality but they allowed me to look at what gestures really mattered and which ones felt less necessary to control and in doing so, create an installation where I could add or remove focus from certain elements of the work. From reading scores and making new ones I began to build a vocabulary of gesture that surrounds all the works with leaning at the core. Leaning is a gesture that pushes the body out of its autonomous position into a vulnerable one, a gesture usually performed by female bodies as part of a labour of care.
Palma que Camina is part of an ongoing body of work that examines memory, gesture, technology, and nature as generative dislocations, allowing us to confront untranslatability, intimacy, and identity. The object, inspired by the natural landscape of my home country, Ecuador, is juxtaposed with everyday smells and the context of its exhibition in London art spaces, creating a sense of pause and discomfort.
On the studio wall there are letters to Pablo, my aunt’s recipes, notes to my mom, my grandma’s handkerchief in a ziploc bag. Pablo, a friend from childhood, tells me about his work with infectious disease vaccines and music he heard last week. I try to put into words in my head, my heart, my hand, speaking to him I make sense of my making. My aunt made the best lemon pie and taught me how my grandma cooked. My mom shows me how to look and how to hold, how to pause. My grandma passed away when I was 7, my aunts gave me her handkerchief for my birthday last year.
On the studio wall there are also milagritos which are objects of intention and protection, in some cases religious, for me superstitious. Some screen printed, some made of tin, resin or glass. Neither of them speak directly to the rest of my work and they are not steps in a larger process but rather parallel practices of care that allow the rest to exist. I make them as ways of understanding space and processing distance without them being intended to exist anywhere other than the wall.
Suelo de páramo – Ground Studies is a body of work that evokes the Ecuadorian highland ground through textile and scent. The digitally knitted pieces are based on studies of 10 x 10 cm sections of Ecuadorian páramo, abstracted into color and texture and then reconstructed into larger compositions. Staring at the ground serves as a starting point for examining the roles of distance, nature, memory, and place. These elements, combined with digital technologies, reframe and re-inhabit female labour and craft, resulting in a practice that seeks to develop a new epistemology. The work is accompanied by a scent distilled from a sample of Antisana highland ground, which can be sprayed onto the textile.
Emilia González Salgado LG, 2024
Upcoming exhibitions
– Jan 16 – Feb 2: John Ruskin Prize at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, UK
– Feb 3 – 18: Fem/o/type. Mujeres ecuatorianas en las prácticas contemporáneas del bioarte y la naturaleza Sala de las Escaleras BBAA UCLM, Cuenca, Spain
– Feb 6 – 12: London Group Annual at RWS Gallery, 3-5 Whitcomb Street, London, WC2H 7HA
– Jul 24 – Aug 22: Force with no net sum at Industra Art, Brno, Czech Republic
A Question of Process is a detailed portrait of the Group in action.
Here are links to all AQOP articles:
AQOP 1 1-5…..Angela Eames, James Faure Walker, Ece Clarke, Neil Weerdmeester, Ade Adesina
AQOP 2 6-8…..Alexandra Harley, Almuth Tebbenhof, Paul Tecklenberg
AQOP 3 9-11…Charlotte C Mortensson, Eric Fong, Judith Jones
AQOP 4 12-14 Aude Hérail Jäger, Stephen Carley, Beverley Duckworth
AQOP 5 15-16 Ian Parker, Micheál O’Connell / Mocksim
AQOP 6 17-19 Simon Reid, Genetic Moo, Alex Ramsay
AQOP 7 20-21 Eugene Palmer, Carol Wyss
AQOP 8 22-23 Tricia Gillman, Cadi Froehlich
AQOP 9 24-25 Stathis Dimitriadis, Emilia González Salgado