Scent Memory Database (SMDB)

The creative team were invited to consider the crossover of scent and memory, specifically responding to themes within Hayley Caldwell’s PhD thesis on memory. MOD’s brief invited reflection on the mechanisms responsible for memory reactivation, and the emotional or psychological dimensions of nostalgia as it links to scent. The work needed to be interactive without being actively hosted by invigilators, while remaining low-maintenance over the year-long exhibition period. MOD’s target audience (age 15-25) was an essential factor in developing this work, as was the desire of the Museum to facilitate learning and exploratory experiences that encourage open ended conversation.

The shelving, which forms the foundation of the work, houses 224 individual scents in storage, each with a strong olfactory relationship to bodies, what we wear, eat, sleep or bathe in. Keeping scents fresh and active across a year-long exhibition was a significant challenge. Individual scents are packaged to remain fresh and pungent where they may otherwise become dulled if accessible all at once. Summer, autumn, winter and spring each mark the opening of a new bank of packets, providing fresh scent releases across the year-long exhibition.

The design develops the visual language of data banks, seed storage facilities, and museum archives, for audiences to conceptually consider their storage of memories with particular reference to scents.

The Scent Memory Database begins with proprietary industrial shelving to evoke a sensibility of mass storage. The steel shelving system has been enhanced and appropriated with bold colours to make the sculptural element feel more anatomical and visceral. The individual shelves are compressed closely together, as close as the system allows, creating fourteen platforms in each of the four banks. Each shelf houses a unique scent, packaged into four separate pink anti-static heat-sealed bags. Colourful cord ties and secures the packets to the metal gridded shelves. At the commencement of each season one of the four packets are opened to reveal a strongly scented cloth within. The type of cloth utilised has been selected to correspond with the scent it supports: shampoo is applied to fluffy white towels, wine is embedded in carpet, insect repellent absorbed in mosquito net, Lynx Afrika sprayed onto jersey, etc. Reference stickers are applied to the sides of the shelves and the individual packets to catalogue the scent contained and the date for opening. References to the scents within are poetic, rather than didactic, to encourage and prompt an exploration of individual association that may be unique to each visitor’s memory.