Gabriela Cociasi
Mixed media artist, #Virtual Perfumer
There is this border between a perfumer, a digital and a virtual perfumer. Between a practitioner, a philosopher and a dreamer. I reflect the perfume, digitise the aroma through subliminal means and creates this linguistic and visual impletion of something called a virtual perfume.
I make mixed media perfumes where everything can be an ingredient with an emotional end or beginning. Essential oils, thread, wood, waste, video, sound, image, embroidery, drawings, paintings, ceramic sculptures… The elements commingle in creating a new reality for the sense of smell. In the end, my art work may only be a word. Or an empty container.
In a world where we can make our brain believe that a synthetic liquid is the juice of an exquisite flower and still reject the smell of our own urine as being grotesque, beastly, I try to detach the audience from simple observation and insinuates olfactory art in the absence of smell.
My work is an intimation of the Futurist manifesto where olfactory art was firstly recognised. Anarchy against silent art, a destruction of the solemn and hieratic. I get inspired also by Ani Liu, Maki Ueda or Peter de Cupere, scientific, emotional and poetical olfactory artists, all trying to understand how olfactory art determines behavioural changes.
I am also an avid admirer of Angela Ellsworth who speaks in her work about how odour perception allows our unconscious mind to build social significance. In 1997, Ellsworth wore at the opening reception for the artist Muriel Magenta a cocktail dress soaked in her own urine and the audience could not determine the source of the smell.
I use olfaction as a representational format of cognitive states. My art may lack the actual olfactory stimulus but I am conveying clues for emotional reflection. The audience is always tested, interrogated.
EXHIBITIONS
2020 – Video. Virtual Exhibition, I speak odour. Winter Show project at School of Art, Architecture and Design. Whole year group exhibition.
2020 – Virtual Exhibition Proposal End of the Year Show, ‘4‘, part of #VirtualFragrance by #VirtualPerfumer – School of Art, Architecture and Design. Whole year group exhibition.
2019 – Sculpture, Painting and Installation. Winter Show – Cracker 19, Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. Whole year group exhibition.
2019 – Painting and sculpture. Pop-up group Exhibition, The Golden Ratio, St Giles in the Fields, London. Artists: Emma Collins, Yasmine Braunhofer, Gabriela Cociasi, Klaudia Chara, Heidi Baines. Curators: Emma Collins, Yasmine Braunhofer, Gabriela Cociasi, Klaudia Chara, Heidi Baines
2019 – Sculpture. Spring show, Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. Whole year group exhibition.
2018 – Sculpture and painting. Winter Show – Cracker 18, Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. Whole year group exhibition.
Gabriela Cociasi 