Olfactory installation, 2019–

First presented at Fischer, Reykjavík, during DesignMarch 2019.

WHAT MAKES A FOREST SMELL LIKE A FOREST?

Forest Shower grew out of my work with Ilmbanki íslenskra jurta, my ongoing archive of Icelandic flora.

I had been gathering plants and trees from Icelandic forests, distilling and extracting their scents.

Over time I became interested in something beyond the smell of an individual plant.

What makes a forest smell like a forest?

The damp earth.
Moss.
Bark.
Leaves.
Needles.
Wood.
The air after rain.

I wanted to take these fragments apart and bring them together again as something that could be experienced with the whole body.

FOREST BATHING

Shinrin-yoku means forest bathing.

But there is no bath.

I found that slightly funny.

So I made a shower.

Forest Shower became my literal interpretation of the idea.

A place where you could actually step underneath the scent of a forest and let it fall onto your body.

INSIDE THE SCENT

As the work developed, I became curious about what was actually inside the oils I was distilling.

I began having some of them chemically analysed, looking more closely at the volatile compounds carried by different trees and plants.

The forest began to reveal itself in another way.

Not as one smell, but as many compounds, present in different proportions from one species to another.

This became part of the thinking behind Forest Shower.

An attempt not only to reconstruct the smell of the forest, but to step inside its invisible chemistry.

THE MIST

The scent is carried in the water itself.

Ultrasonic vibrations atomise the scented water into a fine, cool mist without heat.

The mist travels through the installation and falls slowly from above,

carrying the scent with it.

It settles on the skin, clothes and hair.

You don’t wash in it.

You step into it.

For a moment, you are surrounded by the smell of the forest.

Not a copy of one particular forest.

More like a memory of being inside one

           

Bergsveinn Birgisson has long been one of my favourite writers.When I was preparing a Forest Shower installation for Madison Ilmhús, I asked him if he would write something for it.

He did.

And this is what he wrote.