‘Orifice’ by STUDIO_ edwardlorenz

For the third site-and-time-specific olfactory artwork presented alongside Edward Crutchley’s collection, ORIFICE is an expansion of the themes from Autumn/Winter 2023: the study of hardness and softness, of darkness and light, and of the early Medieval period. 

There are two distinct scent profiles to this work, two significantly different experiences that clash, harking back to the dualities present in Crutchley’s work: the sacred and the profane, the gauche and the urbane. 

Part one is built around orris — a raw material used frequently in old perfumery and still used in trace amounts in the most luxurious perfumes. It takes at least 7 years to produce 1kg: 3 years to grow the bulb of the Iris germanica underground, and 4 years to age and ferment it to its distinctive lipstick-like smell. 

Part two is built around oud — a historically Eastern and Middle Eastern material used in perfumery that has now only come into fashion in the West. Another extremely labour and time intensive material, oud is a resinous exude from a small pairing of species of trees that are the result of an immune response to a fungal infection. The best ouds take at minimum 30 years to age within a tree.