Places features

Smells can take you back in an instant. A waft of perfume, the polished reek of an institutional corridor and you're years away.

The Reg Vardy Gallery's exhibition, If There Ever Was, is a collection of 13 stories and their aromas. An empty room at first glance, there are small texts placed along the walls with motion-sensitive scent puffers below each.

Robert Blackson sniffing his exhibition

You can breathe in the scent of extinct plants, the sun, the Hiroshima bomb, perfume samples recovered from the Titanic, Cleopatra's hair, a death row prisoner's last meal.

This sensory display was dreamt up by the gallery's curator, Robert Blackson, who enlisted the help of botanists, astronomers, historians and scientists.

Eleven fragrance designers, or "noses" conjured up the smells.

Sensory alchemy

All chemists, some of them see themselves as alchemists mixing, as Robert puts it, otherworldly things together. Others make perfumes or deodorants. One is a flavourist, one of those people who make your yoghurt smell, and taste, of strawberries. Assuming it hasn't come into contact with the real thing, of course.

He says: "It's that idea that chemicals can be mixed in such a way that they then taste like something else," and says the creation of a scent of strawberries, for example, isn't that different from a still life painting of strawberries. Both are representations.

The stories came first. Robert says: "None of these smells existed before in a bottle. So the way the stories came about was, really, reading the newspaper, reading books, talking to people and coming up with 30 or so different ideas that could, perhaps, be interesting smells."

A example of the exhibition's texts.

He then whittled them down to a shortlist that would create what he calls a bit of a push and pull: "So, you might recognise a floral-ness in the extinct flowers smell and that can draw you in to be, ok, I kind of know what this is about, it smells a little bit familiar, and then to move on to something like Hiroshima which really doesn't smell like anything you might be previously familiar with."

Are we sitting comfortably?

In deciding which to use, the story took precedence. Then Robert introduced the stories to the fragrance designers: "And they basically cherry picked. So there was one guy in Paris who said, I want to make the smell of the sun, and there was another guy in Germany, he wants to do the Mir, and this is how it comes together."

Robert describes the stories as setting a stage for the smells to fill. Take the young woman arrested by the Stasi in East Berlin. The text reads: "Before being released, the Stasi gave her a square of fabric to wipe against the back of her neck. This fabric was then kept by the Stasi in a sealed jar with her name on it...The Stasi tracked the movements of suspected dissenters with trained sniffer dogs.

The If There Ever Was exhibition.

To get the scent of their suspects, the Stasi employed a variety of methods such as breaking into apartments and stealing dirty clothes or sitting suspects in a heated room for questioning. The Stasi would then save a patch of fabric from this chair's upholstery that had absorbed the suspect's body odour."

Robert is pleased with the response and says it's been similar to that prompted by an ordinary art show. He's seen couples argue among themselves about whether they like a certain smell or not.

Thought provoking

He's also pleased that the exhibition seems to have made people think about smells: "There was a guy who came in on the first day of the exhibition and he was walking around in the morning and he came back for the opening and he was saying how his sense of smell got a little bit more acute after leaving the gallery, that he had a new sense of perception that he wasn't really paying attention to previously."

Robert can still smell the smells, despite working among them every day. They're puffed out mechanically as you walk past. There's enough for two months, apparently.

Jiggle about a bit if the motion sensor doesn't pick you up. The smells follow you from one text to another; lean close if you're not sure you're smelling the right thing. But not too close or you'll end up smelling of roses and the sun and Hiroshima and strawberry shortcake for the rest of the day.

If There Ever Was is on at the Reg Vardy Gallery on Ryhope Road, Sunderland until 6 June 2008.

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