Should you wish to know what the cesspit of a Norman fortress smelled like, Tasha Marks has ventured there. Go to Rochester Castle, descend the dank steps and put your nose to the smell chamber. What rich delights await? It’s not just the stink of human excrement and urine. “We know that there was food waste in there,” says Marks. And animal waste. Marks says she is never sure what to describe herself as, but “scent designer, historian and artist” comes close. Where a perfumer blends alluring scents for the body, Marks creates custom-made odours for spaces – usually museums, galleries and historic buildings.
“I work closely with the curators around developing a smell,” she says. “They send me lots of information – it doesn’t have to be smell-related. I just want to know everything about it and begin to imagine what it might smell like.” From there, Marks works with chemists and perfumers, who help her blend aromas, and with fragrance libraries that have all manner of scents – including the worst. “There’s otter poo, dragon poo … there’s one just called ‘poo’.” It isn’t about authentically recreating a smell, she says of her evocative work: “It’s about storytelling.”
Marks has arranged a selection of scents for me to sniff on her dining room table at her home in London, where she lives with her wife and their super-sniffing corgi. If I had expected it to be full of intoxicating scents and mysterious phials, like an alchemist’s laboratory, I am a little disappointed – it smells clean and homely. The only clues to Marks’s work are a jar of sugar containing small lumps of ambergris (whale vomit, basically, once a prized perfumer’s ingredient), a wooden cabinet stuffed with curios such as antique jelly moulds, and a 3D replica of her nose. Hung up high on the wall, the nose is a keepsake from an artwork she installed this year – a wall of 360 noses named The Noseum – in the new fragrance area in Liberty department store in London.
She dips strips of paper into a bottle containing a breast milk scent. We sniff the warm, bodily aroma. It isn’t just milky; it also has a sweet powderiness that many of us might instantly associate with baby products. It was made for the Wellcome Collection’s permanent exhibition Being Human, which opened in 2019; Marks scented a bronze sculpture to evoke breast milk, a work she titled 5318008 (if you ever typed this into a calculator at school and “read” it upside down, you’ll understand). The pudding sweetness comes from the vanillin in it, the odour compound of vanilla, she explains. “It’s also the thing that old books smell of – when books get old and start to age, they release vanillin, which is why we like the smell of them.”
Marks is working on a project for the British Library, an exhibition about the lives of medieval women, which opens in the autumn. As well as an 11th-century hair perfume and breath freshener, Marks has created “heaven and hell” scents inspired by descriptions of two female saints who experienced olfactory spiritual revelations. One, says Marks, “is of the devil with hands around her neck and breathing fetid breath into her ear”. The other was inspired by the woman’s account of “this transportive sweet smell that was like nothing on earth, this very sort of unnatural sweetness”.
We sniff “hell” first – not sulphuric, as you might imagine, because, says Marks, museums don’t like sulphuric compounds (it plays havoc with conservation efforts). “So this is much more faecal, a bit smoky. But it’s not hideous – you don’t want it to be so repulsive that people are retching in the exhibition. You want it to be challenging, but I could have made it worse.”
The heaven scent, meanwhile, is sweet, but not sickly. “There are some synthetic compounds in here not found in nature,” says Marks, of the otherworldly element she wanted to include. “Artificial in a pleasant way.”
During the Covid pandemic, many people temporarily lost their sense of smell – sometimes with disastrous results, including depression, loneliness and loss of appetite – perhaps highlighting how we previously undervalued this sense. If Marks’s workload this year is anything to go by, there may be a newfound interest and respect for scent. As well as the British Library exhibition, she is doing historic aromas for a National Trust property, including the reek of battle (“bloody and smoky, mulchy and earthy”), and for the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, including one reminiscent of a dinosaur habitat (“a bit volcanic, swampy, vegetal”). “Smell has this great advantage that you have to be there to experience it,” she says, “so it brings people into museums and galleries and is a nice collective public experience.”
Marks doesn’t really believe in “good” or “bad” odours – it’s subjective, situational and cultural. “We can learn to associate good things with ‘bad’ smells – if you smell a really ripe cheese on the London underground, that’s going to smell disgusting. But in a nice shop or at home, that smells delicious. We learn to attribute certain positive attachments to smells.” For one museum exhibition about the Roman empire, Marks created the scent of the purple tunics worn by the elite. The dye, Tyrian purple, was made from the mucus of a sea snail, “so when it got slightly wet, it would smell like fish, and that became a sign of excellence. It’s a learned response – this is the smell of luxury, this means expensive.” Scent is divisive: I love the smell of petrol, while Marks hates it. “Maybe you’ve had good associations with garages,” she suggests (I do – garages mean snacks). “For me, it meant sitting in the car and getting a headache.”
Marks is not a natural super-smeller (although she is pregnant and, like many in pregnancy, has a heightened sense of smell), but she has trained herself to perceive odours better and says we can all do the same. “Smell is a very under-trained sense, generally. We don’t learn to use it on its own; we don’t think to smell things or explore with our nose. So, for me, the biggest shift was learning to be aware of what I was smelling. You can’t turn your nose off – we’re smelling all the time – but to pay attention is more of an active choice.”
Marks grew up in central London. She lists its nostalgic aromas: her grandmother’s carpet; her grandfather’s favourite mints; her mother’s roast chicken dinners; the diesel of her other grandfather’s black cab. She did a degree in history of art and, as part of it, studied food history. “It changed everything I was interested in.” When she left university, she worked for the creative studio Bompas and Parr, which made architectural jelly sculptures and held immersive food and drink events. Then, in 2011, she started her own company, AVM Curiosities (it stands for animal, vegetable, mineral – the early museum classifications), and trained as a confectioner, specialising in Renaissance sugar sculpture: elaborate and beautiful shapes created from what was then a luxury ingredient, for the banquets of wealthy people.
Marks’s interest in flavour – a combination of taste, aroma and even emotion – led her increasingly towards smell. She took courses in chemistry, blending and how to train her nose. “I was noticing smells more, which is fine if you’re in nature and all smelling lovely, but less fine if you live in London and you’re noticing the smells of the tube and the bins,” she says with a laugh. She likes the popular ones, she says: cut grass, coffee. “But my favourite smell is when you go on holiday and you come back – that smell when you first open the door to your house.” Wearing perfume is a hindrance in her work (her tip when becoming overwhelmed by different scents, for instance when fragrance-shopping, is to “reset” your nose by sniffing your own bare skin).
On one course, a renowned perfumer led the class in a “smell meditation”, asking them to imagine a fruit. “After you’ve spent a long time picturing it, you bring it to your mind’s nose and see if you can smell it. It was the first time I’d ever imagined a smell and it was a really uncanny sensation. Then he asked us to imagine something more nostalgic.” Ask someone to think of a scent memory, says Marks, and the vast majority will come up with something attached to a grandparent. “It makes sense because, if you think about childhood memories with scents related to them, we’re often immune to the smell of our own homes, but if you go to a close family member’s home, there is a smell attached to that. It’s a very poignant, aromatic experience from a young age. I imagined my grandma’s carpet so clearly that the pattern came into sharp focus, and I imagined the smell.” Now, she says, she can conjure up aromas fairly easily, including combinations of different ones. “A bit like when someone can read music, they hear the music; it can be the same with smell.”
Scents are so entwined with memory and emotion, “because the way you process smell is different from the other senses. It goes through our olfactory bulb, which is at the front of the brain. That’s also responsible for our memories and a lot of our emotions, so you have a much more visceral response to smell memories.” When she was developing her breast milk scent, she went to a milk bank that collects and distributes donated breast milk to babies in need and they warmed up a sample for her to sniff. “I had such a visceral reaction to it that it must have unlocked a core memory.”
Marks once worked on an exhibition about the Thames docks for the Museum of London. She replicated the smells of the environment – engine oil, smog, wilting seaweed and fresher marine notes – but she also created a scent based on the recollection of one woman who remembered her grandfather, a docker, drying his woollen jacket on an electric fire. When the woman smelled it, Marks recalls, “she got quite tearful, because it really hit the mark for her. She started describing her grandparents’ wallpaper – it evoked this visual memory.”
Our sense of smell develops early in the womb and has many evolutionary facets, Marks explains – we adapt to smell after about seven minutes so that we can notice new and potentially dangerous smells, such as smoke or the scent of a predator. Although we appear to be programmed to be repulsed by certain smells, such as rotting food, with other aromas our sense of disgust is learned. “Children don’t have that revulsion to poo and bodily functions that adults do; they have to be taught,” says Marks. “Children have less inhibitions with it and really like malodorous smells. When I’m designing for a museum, I often encourage that, because younger visitors enjoy it.” We will tolerate, or even enjoy, the bodily aromas of family members, but be repulsed by those of a stranger. “There’s a very basic, animalistic requirement to use smell as a sense of belonging and it’s something that kids are intuitive with. They would know absolutely the smell of one of their parents, or the smell of each other, without having the words to put to it – that is how they relate to the world. As adults, we forget that’s one of the things we’ve done.”
When many people lost their sense of smell during a Covid infection, she says, “one of the things they really struggled with was: ‘I can’t smell my kids.’ It’s not something we’re really aware of, but when you realise you can’t, these things suddenly feel alien.” Our sense of smell does decrease with age, but also we don’t train it, Marks says. “Smell becomes very integrated with the other senses: we learn that smell means taste, and we learn to associate objects with certain smells because of how they look. If you have your eyes closed and you smell rosemary and lavender side by side, most people struggle to tell them apart.”
Even language can affect our perception of odours. Marks hands me a bottle of scent she is working on for the Lowry arts centre in Salford. “This is the smell of Salford, 1910 – quite industrial, imagining the horses and carts and the bricks.” As soon as she says the word “brick”, I get a hit of rain-soaked brickwork. “Exactly!” says Marks. “Our sense of smell is really suggestible.”
As a society, though, we have become less tolerant of odour. “We’ve sterilised a lot of our smells; cleanliness is associated with the removal of smell,” says Marks. “So the smell of ‘clean’ for a lot of people is the absence of smell.” Think about all the bouquets we are missing out on, the multisensory world that could be open to us if we only twitched our nostrils. “We all have a lot to gain from it,” she says. “I think the best thing we can do is be more aware of what we’re smelling, really start to treasure your nose and to think with smell.”
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