Exclusive interview with Kate McLean, Mapper for Urban Smellscapes
In town to craft Singapore’s very own scent map, we spoke to Kate McLean on her fascinating job scope and how smells intrigue her.
If you could define countries according to smells, how would you describe the scent of Singapore?
We bet you’re feeling stumped because in a day alone, your nose picks up a whole plethora of scents ranging from food to rain to artificial fragrances in malls, which are also entirely ephemeral. That’s not to say deciphering a scent for Singapore is not possible though. At least it’s not impossible for Kate McLean, Mapper for Urban Smellscapes
Trained as a Graphic Designer, McLean has crafted multiple sensory walks that bring people on a journey through neighbourhoods in different cities as they actively take in the smells wafting around before jotting down their first perception. This time, Singapore too got a chance to host McLean’s intriguing senses in a bid to come up with a scentmap of our island state.
Fascinated by the olfactory wonders, we spoke to Kate McLean to gain more insight into the intriguing work she does and what it takes to essentially craft a good scentmap.
Marie France Asia: What piqued your interest in capturing the scents of different cities?
Kate McLean: My interest in ‘capturing scents’ started when I was undertaking an MFA in Graphic Design at Edinburgh College of Art. I was deconstructing and mapping perceptions of the city through 4 individual senses; texture, sight, smell and taste. After completing the degree I decided to focus on smell because I found it to be captivating and also significantly under researched in terms of how we can share our understanding of the smellscape. We breath 24,000 times per day affording our nostrils the opportunity to collect 1000 different smells every hour. And humans have the potential to discriminate up to 1 trillion different odours, yet our language for smell is bereft of common descriptors. I was attracted by its ephemerality, its multiple temporalities and also its subjectivity and capacity to generate time travel and momentary location-displacement on the part of the sniffer. In short, it was problematic to communicate (visually and olfactorily) and that is what makes for a great art and design research study.
MFA: How do you go about constructing a scent map?
K.M.: My work is an art and design mapping practice that engages the people who live and work in the city to immerse in the process. It operates at two levels; first in the form of the scent walks and secondly as a physical interpretation of the ‘data’ collected. In the past two weeks I have facilitated 18 scentwalks with over 250 participants generated from AllSense’s invitees and a general public audience following some very successful PR. This has resulted in a total of over 2500 individual ‘smellnote’ perceptions. After recording the human, lived-in smell perceptions via scentwalks and smellnotes I then immerse myself in the notes to analyse the handwritten data seeking commonalities of perception in terms of background, episodic and curiosity scents.
I then select specific scents to be depicted, geo-locate them on a map, use my own symbology to depict intensity, then use a creative process based on wind speed and direction to indicate where the selected scents may travel to. The resulting ‘map’ defies traditional understandings of maps as scientific cartography that seeks direct representation of world, instead it is a map of possibility! The final result is site-specific and can be either projected as a still or as a motion graphic, or it may be printed.
MFA: Smells tend to be subjective and personal so how do you keep the scents on your scent map objective?
K.M.: My aim is to celebrate and highlight the subjective elements of human perceptions of the smellscape. My art practice is concerned with facilitating a sharing of urban smellscapes perceptions and is a qualitative study. I never claim that the scents are objective, and my research to date indicates that it may not even be possible.
MFA: What do you tend to keep a ‘nose’ out for during the walking tours?
K.M.: Cities are rich in their scents and any street can yield a vast array of different odours, firstly it is good to attune the body and brain to walking ‘nose-first’ instead of eyes first – I do this with a process I call ‘scent catching’ or passive smelling. Then we progress to a process I name ‘scent hunting’ whereby we use our eyes and ears to source potentially interesting smells – a car battery, a brightly coloured flower, some trash, cardboard, extraction fans, the sea. Sometimes these smells will be what we expect and other times they will be completely the opposite!
MFA: What have you figured out from the walking tours so far, regarding Singapore?
K.M.: In the walks completed to date much of Singapore’s scentscape is based on food, spices, medicines and herbs. Different human scents interweave with the foods. From a cursory glance there is little mention of car exhaust and fumes.
More specifically there are some great lyrical descriptions of scents that are particularly evocative such as ‘the scent of a hard life’ and ‘the scent of consumerism’, some very personal; ‘the smell of deep dark secrets’ and ‘guilty pleasures’ as well as some literal terms ‘fried rice’, ‘jackfruit’, ‘metallic’, ‘pandan’ and the ubiquitous signposts of future visual encounters – ‘durian’ and ‘jasmine’. Many walkers reference the humidity both as a scent and as a scent in its own right and as a reason for why scents linger in Singapore. The scents of many locations in the city are extremely complex.
MFA: Do you already have an idea of what Singapore’s scent map will smell like? Would you give us some hints?
K.M.: I currently have no idea what Singapore’s scent map will look like and it may take many years to finalise. One concept for the study is to compare the scentscapes of neighborhoods in the mornings and in the evenings. With this in mind I conducted scentwalks along identical routes at 10am and at 8pm. It will take a series of visualization studies to see what patterns emerge.
MFA: What are some of the other cities you’re planning to create scent maps for?
K.M.: At the moment I have a couple of requests to undertake further scent mappings from the USA to Europe and Asia. However I have plenty to work with for the moment and do not wish to overcommit with my fulltime work of university teaching at Canterbury Christ Church University in the UK.
MFA: When and how will the scent map of Singapore be unveiled?
K.M.: I am working towards an initial overview / ‘sketch map’ for the scents of Singapore to be displayed at AllSense’s forthcoming exhibition in August at ION Orchard. My final works will take at least another couple of years before they will materialise.
Tarandip Kaur
Do you know the origin of the idea of smell mapping of cities? YOU should! Sissel Tolaas the pioneer of smell mapping cities and beyond!