Essence of Nostalgia

Blown Glass | Core-Cast Glass | Arduino | Scent | 2018

​Essence of Nostalgia are a collection of core-cast glass objects exploring the relationship between nostalgia and scent, while simulating the immersive experience of Olfactory Recall.

"​Nostalgia is the fleeting yet extremely powerful feeling of the past; it is the yearning for a perfect time, an emotional episode that we experience through our senses, touching, hearing, seeing and even tasting. The olfactory system - our sense of smell - is said to be one of the most powerful and emotionally evocative of our five senses due to its direct link to the limbic system which deals with the processing of emotion.
Every second of every day we are exposed to scent particles, proccessing them unwittingly, yet we are stopped in our tracks when we are met with a familiar scent, reminded of people we once knew and places we had once frequented. Some of these memories are thought to be long forgotten, yet scent has the power to conjure these past experiences, initiating the emotional phenomenon that is nostalgia."

​Through the experimentation of a modified core-casting process which incorporates glass blown objects, each piece visually interprets the moment that memories are ignited by scent, celebrating the beauty of interpretation whilst using glass as a multi-sensory tool.

"Through our own interpretations we can view the multidimensional complexities of smell, embracing the subjective qualities that can so easily affect our response and perception of a smell or an object. A specific brand of perfume may smell delicately musky on one person’s skin, yet smell differently on the skin of another. One may perceive what was thought to be a bitter scent as being a sweet scent, and one smell that holds relevance to one person may mean something completely different to another."

Hotshop, Beeswax, 2018, Cara Louise Walker