Mooramong Residency: Anna May Kirk

What happens when artworks enter, reside and pass through the body? Can art biologically influence the experience of the perceiver? Anna May Kirk utilises scent as an artistic medium to encourage empathetic perception of the bodies multispecies realities. Formulating scent based installation and performance that engages smell as an infective agent acting upon the perceivers imagination and biology, provoking mental visions, chemical alternations and memory mutations.

In the sensory and isolated environment of Mooramong, I embarked on research, writing and scent making that asked; how can art affect us biologically?

Mooramong, a property on Wadawurrung country, is a site that saturates the senses. The air wafts of pungent sheering sheds, delicate flower gardens and musty carpet lining the art deco homestead, of fallen fruit, a chlorinated pool, lives of sheep and airy parlours. Mooramong is a 45 minute drive from Ballarat and the evenings are frozen in silence and plunged into darkness. Here scent is exceptionally forthcoming, and for me this was a rich world of research and inspiration whilst on the Blindside Regional Art + Research Residency.

I came to Mooramong with the aim of developing my research around scent as an artistic medium able to affect the body on a biological and molecular level. Playing on my mind where question such as; what happens when concept manifests in the body? How can the inside of the body be explored as an exhibition site? And how can we create speculative narratives with scent and sense? In the cottage where we were staying I set up a nest of readings and spent the first week enveloping myself in the research of others. This included texts such as Osmologies: Toward Aroma Composition, a PhD paper by artist David Haines which describes scent as provoking “mental visions that form out of aromatic intoxication”. These papers were absorbed in the company of the paddock sheep, clouds of flies, passing kangaroos and unseen snakes. I was also incredibly lucky to be in the company of Manisha Anjali and Roberta Rich - our discussions of time and time travel, doubles, love, the uncanny, climate change and climate futures were the ecosystem in which my research inhabited over the fortnight.

Our time at Mooramong was during the devastating bushfires that were sweeping NSW and VIC. Not yet affected, the potential of emergency at Mooramong was in constant peripheral vision, underscored most clearly by the parked fire trucks that bookended the property. In the cottage I set up a make-shift studio and filled it with the beakers, bottles and a myriad of perfume making oils I had lugged down from Sydney. I made a perfume using scents from plants, flowers and elements that are meant to soothe the respiratory tract after smoke inhalation. Through the senses, I hope for this work to intermingle with the chemistry of the body in futile hope of relief. Post residency I am now working on a wearable amulet like bottle for this perfume, taking inspiration from Victorian era tear bottles (during times of grief one cries into the bottle, when the tears have completely evaporated the mourning period is over) and Pomander Balls from the Middle Ages (wearable metal balls filled with scent meant to keep the ‘bad’ air that was believe to cause illness and climate changes away).

2020 has been a year of emergency. The fires and now the COVID-19 virus have added a context of urgency to my continued research after the Mooramong residency. I am continuing my research into questions of sense, biology and bodies focusing on how embodied art practices situated in speculative fiction can imagine human and nonhuman futures. In such times of uncertainty, I hope to work on sensorial immersive installation and performance works that look critically at our present moment through re-imagining the past and contemplating potential futures.

Anna May Kirk, 2020.