Sissel Tolaas / Norway

Norway born 1962

Sissel Tolaas is a smell designer, artist, chemist, researcher and odour theorist working across research, commercial and creative innovation. While smell is Tolaas’s medium, her approach to scent is anything but conventional; for the artist, smell is information.
Smell is a crucial sense, used and understood (often unconsciously) by people to trigger their memories of time and place. Stemming from a desire to counter the ‘continuous wholesale deodorisation’ of the world, Tolaas composes provocative smells to stimulate memory, recreate place, capture the seasons and arouse emotional and intellectual responses.

For the NGV Triennial Tolaas has created a ‘smell landscape’ of Melbourne composed of twenty unique smells for you to touch and smell – building a picture of the city in your mind, made up by smells both pleasant and unpleasant. The audience is invited to guess what each smell is. Through this project Tolaas aims to stimulate stories about time and place to enhance our understanding of our surroundings and to enable us to reconnect with our sense of smell – a sense she believes is being lost.

BIO

Born in Norway and currently based in Berlin, Tolaas studied mathematics, chemical science, languages and visual art in Norway, Poland, Russia and the United Kingdom. In 2004, with support from International Flavors & Fragrances Inc., Tolaas founded the SMELL RE_searchLab, a workspace to research, develop and execute smell-related projects for institutional, educational and individual clients.

Supported by the NGV Foundation.