clara weale is an independent scent designer and perfumer.
She works out of Glasgow, Scotland.
She works out of fascination and obsession.
She works out how and why things smell the way they do, and what it all means.
She works out of Glasgow, Scotland. She works out of fascination and obsession. She works out how and why things smell the way they do, and what it all means.
“I'm a designer who works with scent. Often, that's in the form of creating scents designed to be worn as perfume, but I also create scents designed for other purposes, like an exhibition or installation. I also teach people about scent. My work is concerned with the material reality of our olfactive world. That includes the materials and means used to create scent, our contemporary narratives surrounding scent, who gets to create scent and what they’re saying with it.
Everything that we experience in our day-to-day life is scented. Toothpaste. Antiperspirant. Laundry detergent. All of those scents have been designed by a few people who have gone through a specific form of schooling which has taught them to follow a tradition—which scents are considered desirable to combine, and which are not. And so, every day we're reinforcing the meanings that we attach to those scent combinations, and replicating these same stories around scents.
When you study olfaction, it reveals a kind of truth about the world — that everything is construction. Every single scent we know, from the odour of strawberries to leather, is made up of hundreds of molecules that are being interpreted by our brains. Our brain is recognising these combinations from having experienced them before. But in terms of creating scent, you can use all those little building blocks to recreate something that exists in the real world—rebuild a strawberry—or you can also use them in a completely abstracted way.
I'm interested in the potential that working with these single molecules provides, and how it reframes your understanding of what’s possible. I’m interested in stripping things down. Could I draw a flower with just three pen strokes and can you recognise it as being a flower? At what point does the abstraction tips over into the recognisable?”