Artist creates the world’s first scent-lending library – The Art Newspaper

The artist Donna Lipowitz says she had the concept for her scent library whereas within the forest subsequent to her home. “It’s sort of loopy, however I simply get concepts on a regular basis,” the Australia-born multisensory artist stated one afternoon at her residence in West Seattle, handmade curtains shading her huge assortment of fragrance bottles towards the solar. “I genuinely thought: wouldn’t or not it’s cool should you might borrow scents like books? And would that work? Would folks do it? Would they simply suppose it was silly?”

Thus far, nobody appears to suppose it’s silly. Lipowitz debuted the primary incarnation of her Scent Lending Library in a transformed provide closet in New York in April 2025, on the Olfactory Artwork Keller in Chinatown, drawing a crowd and a line regardless of wet climate. In November 2025, the exhibition opened within the entrance home windows of Fogue Gallery in Seattle’s Georgetown neighbourhood. It has been so fashionable there that in April, it can transfer upstairs right into a everlasting set up area.

What’s within the library? Chanel No. 5, but additionally Bermuda Triangle. Bounce model “Outside Contemporary” dryer sheets. Eau Sauvage, created in 1966 by the perfumer Edmond Roudnitska as a masculine scent for Dior. Important oils like frankincense and eucalyptus. The odor of area (developed in 2008 by the chemist Steve Pearce for the Nationwide Aeronautics and House Administration to assist practice astronauts) and of Cheerios (that includes precise cereal).

Some gadgets are idea scents that Lipowitz herself created, just like the aforementioned Bermuda Triangle and It’ll Be OK, blended in 2020 utilizing aromas usually regarded as uplifting. Her Inexperienced Cicada was created for Olfactory Artwork Keller’s 2022 Portraits in Scent present and is supposed as a self-portrait of the artist, age 5, barefoot within the Australian rainforest.

There are two elements to the library: a reference part (greater than 140 scents) and a lending part (84 scents and counting). The scents are available in small amber bottles with only a hint of perfume on cotton or blotter paper—sufficient to odor, to not put on—and every borrowed odor consists of an old school check-out slip stamped with its return date. (One bottle, labelled “Nothing”, is fully empty.)

A part of the concept behind the library, Lipowitz says, is growing our scent literacy—coaching our noses as we practice our muscle groups, brains or style buds. However it isn’t a lot about with the ability to detect particular odours, bloodhound-like, as it’s growing a capability to note and recognize scent in a world dominated by sight and sound. Lipowitz says one customer to the library, a boy about seven years outdated, smelled a package deal of tennis balls close to the scent vials (there are choose scent props round) and stated, astonished: “So does every thing have a odor?” She might nearly see the gears turning and the home windows opening in his thoughts.

Lipowitz additionally appreciates how the scent library has functioned (each in New York and Seattle) as a 3rd area. Folks convey pals or make new ones there, and generally they’ve emotional experiences introduced on by scent’s capacity to conjure reminiscences. One lady, who smelled the entire library, stated she had each laughed and cried whereas doing so. “It’s like a miniseries,” Lipowitz says. A Scottish man who smelled Residence Storage—a scent Lipowitz created with help from Fogue’s proprietor Kerry Gates—was additionally delivered to tears, having made contact with the ghosts of woodworking tasks previous.

Scent reminiscence

For my very own library expertise, I borrowed two gadgets, Clearwood and Iso E Tremendous. Each are perfumery molecules: constructing blocks of scent which can be usually artificial. Clearwood jogged my memory of patchouli, and Lipowitz stated it had been synthesised in a Swiss lab to seize the extra interesting facets of patchouli whereas avoiding the funkier elements that flip some folks off. Iso E Tremendous, in the meantime, is without doubt one of the most well-known perfumery molecules and was created by Worldwide Flavors & Fragrances in 1973. I used to be fascinated by its capacity to odor just like the entirety of a males’s cologne in only one molecule.

I requested Lipowitz easy methods to get to know my new scents, and he or she suggested me to odor them at completely different instances of day whereas taking notes. As I did so, I used to be shocked at how the aromas modified. I had all the time discovered the interplay of pores and skin and scent attention-grabbing, however this confirmed me how mercurial scent may very well be even when pores and skin is taken out of the equation.

Typically, Iso E Tremendous smelled magnetic and scrumptious; generally, it smelled solely like a person who wished to odor costly (and thus it smelled sort of low-cost). At first, I discovered Clearwood nicer to odor, though I missed the earthier undertow of actual patchouli, or imagined I did. Noon, on a chilly and cloudy Monday, Clearwood opened up into heat, whereas at different instances it appeared sharper and extra chemical. Lipowitz advised me that our sense of odor works greatest within the morning, and whereas my very own idea of “morning” is erratic, each scents smelled greatest to me round 1:30am—fuller, extra nice, much less hole than earlier within the day.

After visiting each the library and Lipowitz’s residence, I requested the artist what makes scent artwork. She talked about a e book she had been studying by the thinker Larry Shiner, Artwork Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Scent and the Olfactory Arts (2020), which describes how olfactory artwork deliberately makes use of odours to create aesthetic experiences. However in contrast to fragrances offered in a retailer, these needn’t be nice. As an alternative, they’re meant, in line with Lipowitz, to “problem our perceptions, categorical complicated ideas and interact the viewers each bodily and intellectually”.

It’s simple to consider scent, not less than in US tradition, principally as one thing to keep away from (take into account the damaging connotation of the phrase “smelly”) or as one thing colonised by luxurious manufacturers. However the expertise needn’t be confined to these two extremes. As I assumed in regards to the library’s enchantment, I thought of how this cultural neglect additionally means there may be room left for the adventurous to play and create refined manoeuvres. The ephemerality of scent, its unpredictability (as my very own borrowings confirmed me), can really feel thrilling. It additionally seems like a means of reinforcing the embodied human, of carving out area for deeply non-public and subjective worlds—ones that we then do our greatest to attempt to focus on and share, whether or not the immediate is the odor of area, Cheerios or strolling across the Australian rainforest at age 5.

“Actually, it’s been fairly overwhelming how fashionable the library has been. It seems like most of the people wants this,” Lipowitz says. As soon as the library has moved upstairs at Fogue, she hopes to broaden into collaborative occasions with different artists, and maybe ultimately into different cities. “I get excited when folks are available in who aren’t perfumers,” she says. “Or who aren’t scent folks. I need everybody to have the ability to have a go.”

Donna Lipowitz: Scent Lending Library, Fogue Studios and Gallery, Seattle