On Emma Aars’ Reports from the Nose

words by Lu Rose Cunningham
 



Images courtesy of Emma Aars’ Reports from the Nose



I’m gifted the line ‘saffron and skin’. In reading this, I envisage kitchens of shifting forms, sites of activity, or one lone chef quietly following their foremothers’ recipe. Within such scenes comes the prickling sensation that arrives with spice, heightened perceptions of heat and colour. An aroma bringing to the fore domesticity; habitual rhythms; implied intimacy, with another being or surface, textures and trace. ‘Paper / cashmere / dust / the short version.’ Emma writes a life in progress and archive simultaneously, (re)collecting and wearing words, wool and whips of particles. It’s the particles in particular I address in Reports from the nose, Emma Aars’ latest collection.

This is not Emma’s first text to be published; whilst studying alongside her in Glasgow a few years back, Emma was specialising in artists books as modes of writing and translating. This would lead to her composing Eye as a Camera, brought into being with Objektiv Press (2024); short reflections on photography, memory and images described rather than pictured. Aars had created an embodied meditation on how photography shapes experience, with a gentle nod to fragrance. During this time Emma was building her letter series too, composing masterfully folded letters from found textual/textural materials, presenting visual formats as a way of writing (Emma is a self-confessed hoarder of paper-based ephemera; fittingly, many are perfume sample papers). Returning to Reports now, I find myself this time honing in on not only pictorial fragments, but life writing through scent.




I ready myself; scent is arguably the most challenging sense to write of. How to create a language that sharpens the haze of something we cannot see. Of course, Emma’s keen observations and brevity means she does not simply write on the sensorial, but of place and belonging, seeking to situate the self, how one’s identity is carried place to place. The manner in which scent travels purposefully, attempting to settle, only then to dissipate with time and lost attention, with another scent masking what was once present.

Correspondence with others. The want to capture and hold a presence. The want to be held. Both mundanity and deep yearning reside in this collection. Absorbing (or losing oneself) into the fabric of things. Moments fading — one might remember again later, the image inferred and marked upon (one’s neck, one’s wrist, perfumed).

I’m reminded of how scent changes its appearance and offering throughout the day; ‘jasmine bushes in bloom during my night runs’, before an olfactory glimpse of ‘banana peels having rested on a warm, sunny windowsill all day.’ Reports is not purely about giving voice to scent or location, but time too. ‘This week smelled of…’ and ‘the past week smelled of…’ I’m offered minute, precise moments of time in vaster temporal stretches. A practice of observance — again amplifying Emma’s relationship to photography — Reports from the nose is a duet of scented texts and tactile vignettes, steeped in the quiet allure of the everyday. Each passage has its own personality or mood — impressions of Emma oscillate between escapist and sombre, contentment and hesitation. Emma speaks of the joys of discovering things, whilst addressing the world’s excess and overproduction. I consider how some scents are natural, others manufactured, ‘simultaneously so fake and so real – a technology in its own right.' How we’re drawn to things that we perhaps shouldn’t. Continuous re-framing of identities.





‘Most perfumes aim to capture the fragrance of their natural counterparts, from grass to flowers to saffron, and maybe we are trained to ignore the scented beauty of things that aren’t natural. Maybe I deep down want to smell like a city. Looking out the window at the early sunset, beige limestone buildings and a big steel scaffolding. It’s a beautiful evening.’

Her scents embody feeling, written liquid-sprays taking on a velvety viscosity that could almost be a solid, as though skin or a pebble to caress. She imparts sensuality, notes corporeal and ethereal. Honest, frank, romantically driven sometimes. I’m reminded of Eileen Myles’ writing on Peter Hujar in ‘The Shabbiness of Beauty’ by Moyra Davey & Peter Hujar (MACK, 2021), how he captured the ineffable, the work always haptic; ‘I’m thinking of smell too, a palpable kind of photography.’ Through Emma’s work too, passages diffuse outwards, smells and scenes surgent.

I’m propelled towards Emma’s writing on rhubarb in this sense, how ‘rhubarb is equivalent to that prematurely cold dip in the sea before the summer has arrived properly.’ The bright tartness, how such writing on scent leads to writing on taste, and in a blink I’m invigorated by a prickle against tongue and limbs, transported by sharp sweetness and spring swims, electrified. Emma shares how in disparate moments rhubarb greets her, speaking of her mother’s love of rhubarb jam before a printed encounter brings the fruit back to her again; ‘I flip through a thick issue of Document magazine as we talk, looking at Wolfgang Tillmans’ photos of Jodie Foster laying in the grass wearing Bottega clothes and Cartier jewellery, peeling a piece of rhubarb in various corners of her house. I have read this piece before, a conversation with David Sedaris, on my phone in bed one morning a couple of months back, but I had forgotten about the rhubarb photos. She looks good in print. The rhubarb is a bit funny, though, out of place. And I love the smell of freshly printed magazines… I think scents are spontaneous. I didn’t plan for all of these rhubarb encounters.’

Her reports unfurl as fluid choreographies, mapping constellations of experience. Looping, past to present and back. This mobile aspect seeps through to the formatting too; an enjoyable feature is the smaller italicised parts punctuating the larger body of text, a written balm I soak in that directs me away from the rolling landscapes of sensations to more succinct listings of a place, smell, flavour, only a few lines long. ‘Eight minus, window open. Air so sweet.’ Like a stage direction, a language of theatre that anoints the reader as enactor of the text; Emma imploring us to actively do the smelling, tasting, leaning out the open window. I embrace such investigative mode, following the reports. Finding oneself in the midst of something, or isolation; the perfume of static or eruption. Perfume as embrace as tempo as placeholder. Admittedly sometimes there are so many visuals implied I have to remind myself to go back over something, to truly slow.

I’m drawn to Emma’s honesty, her eloquent and concise expressions of what it means to dwell and exist, to reach for something. How hard this is to pinpoint; the inadequacy of language as we often know it. To have a grip on an idea, fleetingly. This is a book of smells and sought connectivity, of inter-relations. A reading of routes and rooms. These passages allow us to feel interpolated by the text, to inhale with Emma. I’ve written this over the Spring Equinox, deciding my current favoured scents are dewy grass — the vial version being Aesop’s Tacit after lingering for a while — and linen duvets, not so freshly washed but enshrouded in a warmth like sunshine cutting through cold mornings. I recall Moyra Davey, enacting the role of flâneur with a pull towards transitory beauty. Likewise, Emma’s deftly composed notes unfold as evocative invocations and journeying, each scent captured as a sundry souvenir, from public sphere to personal space, shared.

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