Having a blog and a presence on social media has allowed me to connect with perfumers, creative directors, writers, collectors, and even artists from all walks of life.
Jill Zachman is one of those fascinating people. We first connected about a year ago and talked about my science and fragrance writing activities and her career as a multidisciplinary artist. We stayed in touch, and a few months later, I discovered she launched a fragrance line: The Tilted Chair.
Jill’s work blends the visual arts, poetry, and scent, which are embodied in a collection of fragrances developed in collaboration with Osmo and perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. The Tilted Chair includes four fragrances that exemplify four emotional states that deeply resonate with Jill: Joy, Anticipation, Anxiety, and Isolation.
“The Tilted Chair scents were the basis for two explorations, one in Florence, Italy and the other in New York. Both featured the concepts of four universal emotions expressed as scents, but the medium of inquiry differed,” said Jill during one of our conversations. In the Florence exhibition, she explored scent through visual, tactile, and olfactory senses with printed works on high quality art paper. In New York, the exploration medium switched to large textiles to facilitate social interaction around scent.
In September, Jill will be doing another multi-sensory event in Los Angeles to examine the same four scents from the collection. This time the medium will be sculptural glass objects, and I was excited to learn that they will contain a reformulation of Anxiety, my favorite of the four.
Smoky, phenolic, and mysterious, Anxiety smells like a dark and damp wooded area, encircled by the mist created by thick fog and a relentless drizzle. You smell the green leaves, turned soil, resin tears from the tree bark, and black and leathery birch tar.
The other fragrances from the collection also have an outdoorsy and atmospheric feel. Joy is a tipsy jasmine supported by a woody amber backbone and a bracing touch of sage. Anticipation features an earthy note of bran that nicely fits into a fougère background. Isolation takes the cozy warmth of cinnamon and earthy notes and blends it with the uplifting character of lavender and citrus.
Interview
Intrigued by Jill’s conceptual work and emotion-filled fragrances, I continued my conversation with her and asked her a few questions to learn more about The Tilted Chair.
Jill, tell us more about The Tilted Chair. How did you come up with the idea and what does it mean to you?
I was inspired by Elisa Biagini, a Florentine poet that taught a poetry course in Florence. I was moved by the thought of four universal emotions as I read one of her works. I pondered how the emotions may be common to people but sometimes very hard to express to ourselves and others.
The Tilted Chair scents—Joy, Anticipation, Anxiety, and Isolation—grew out of the concepts and emotions in Biagini’s poem. Hence, we have collaborated on the multi-dimensional scent projects in Florence and New York.
How did you decide to launch your fragrance line with Osmo? Can you briefly walk us through the process of what the creation of your collection and fragrances entailed?
I greatly admire Osmo and the work they do, not only as a fragrance house, but their applications of scent in other fields such as medicine and public health.
My scent research over the years, combining olfaction, linguistics and art, made me aware of the company. I saw an article indicating they wished to develop three case studies involving scent . I applied to be the small fragrance case study they were seeking.
Osmo is filled with very smart and creative people who collaborated with me on scent design and artistry in the packaging. I had already created early drafts of the four scents but Christophe Laudamiel, Osmo’s master perfumer, added depth and complexity without losing the original DNA.
I had been working in print-making and had an etching I wanted to use for the art supporting the fragrances. Osmo was very skilled and accommodating at adapting the etching art to beautiful packaging.
Are there any people, movements, or art forms that inspire you and maybe even your fragrance collection?
I have to give credit to Biagini, Russo, and Laudamiel as great inspirations and co-creators. Henry Valk of Osmo was terrific at development and coordination.
The Getty Center in Los Angeles, with their remarkable art collection, and the Getty Research Library were also great resources in the conceptualization and creation of the Tilted Chair scents.
I have been quite fortunate to have found such bright, creative, and supportive people.
Are there any smells that influenced the selection of ingredients and notes for your fragrances?
The original scents were a product of collaborative work between Biagini, Dottoressa Russo, and me. Dottoressa Russo is a Florentine master perfumer with whom I have studied and with whom I have collaborated over the years.
It was an interesting challenge to identify notes to represent the four Tilted Chair emotions. Perhaps, Joy and Anticipation were the clearer concepts to work with. The real challenge was how to represent highly personal and important feelings such as Anxiety and Isolation as notes and smells. Along with Osmo and Laudamiel, we stretched our olfactory experience and found what are just the right notes in essential oils such as bran, whiskey, and other unusual materials.
What does the fragrance world need more of?
I believe the fragrance world, as the broader world, needs more discernment in the use of new tools such as digitization of scent. Without much discernment and investigation into the work of companies like Osmo, acceleration of needed processes is confused with replacement of trusted and traditional processes, paraphrasing from a recent article in Beauty Matter.
Incipient rejection of ‘artificial’ or ‘synthetic’ processes and products deprives the scent world of needed technologies. For example, collaboration between Osmo and the Institute for Vitro Sciences resulted in a procedure rendering animal testing of products, not only unethical, but unnecessary. In addition, Osmo’s work created new scent molecules capable of repelling mosquitoes without recourse to harmful chemicals in Deet. This is literally a life and death development for most of the global population. Their research into chemical changes in the body is helping to detect diabetes and some forms of cancer.
Discernment, investigation, and regulation of new tools, including digitization of scent are necessary in a world given to blanket rejection or acceptance of ideas and processes based on biases. This represents replacement of the possible and probable with fear and bias-based mythologies deferring discovery of beneficial processes and products. To trust in scent-based new tools is to live beyond one’s limited vision and experience and to consider the needs of larger population.
The Tilted Chair discovery set was kindly gifted to me by Osmo. Read my thoughts about Osmo’s work in a previous article.
