Olfactory artist

I noticed very early that every home had its own smell.

I could often tell who was coming to visit without seeing them, simply by the scent of the person.

And when I was bored visiting people with my parents, I would sometimes sit and try to figure out the smell of their home.

Where was it coming from?

The kitchen? Something frying?

Perhaps a faint smell of rye bread, mixed with grease, horses, or something I couldn’t quite identify.

I would take the smell apart in my head, trying to understand what made this particular home smell like itself.

I still do much the same thing today.

MY FATHER

My first experiments with distillation began with my father, Þórir Bent.

When I was growing up, we used to gather wild Arctic thyme together. We would dry it and use it in food, and we both loved its smell.

At some point, I remember wondering:

Why doesn’t anyone make perfume that smells like this?

My father had an old set of distilling equipment. He brought it out, and together we began adapting it so we could try distilling plants.

I started reading.

We started experimenting.

The first attempt didn’t work.

Neither did the second.

But eventually, we managed to capture the scent of the Arctic thyme.

And then we wanted to try everything.

Around this time, my father became seriously ill.

We spent a lot of time together experimenting, distilling and trying to understand how to capture the scents of the plants around us.

It became something we shared during his illness.

After he died, I kept going.

The work helped me through my grief.

And somewhere in those experiments with my father was the beginning of much of what I do today.

In 2017, together with Elín Hrund Þorgeirsdóttir and Jóhannes Bjarni Eðvarðsson, I began Ilmbanki íslenskra jurta, an ongoing olfactory archive of Icelandic flora.

I started gathering plants and materials from the Icelandic landscape, distilling, extracting and preserving their scents. What began as a research project supported by Rannís has grown over the years into a collection of more than 300 scents.

That work changed the way I think about smell.

I became interested not only in the scent of a plant, but in the scent of a place.

What makes somewhere smell like itself?

What happens to that smell with weather, season and time?

And can it be captured before it disappears?

I rarely know exactly what I am looking for when I begin.

I spend time in a place. I smell, gather, distill and extract. I notice what changes with the weather, what appears for only a few days, what disappears and comes back.

Sometimes I follow something I cannot quite explain.

A smell can lead me to a plant, a memory, a person or another smell. Slowly, a picture begins to form.

Sometimes I work with a place that exists now. Sometimes I work backwards from a memory of somewhere that is gone.

I listen to people and their memories. I take things apart and slowly put them together again through scent.

For me, scent is another way of recording the world.

Not exactly as it was, because a smell is never still.

But perhaps enough to take us back there for a moment.