The Remains of a Memory
I’ve always been obsessed with scent. Not just the obvious kind — a candle, a perfume, a glass of wine — but the smaller, stranger ones. The way plaster smells when it’s drying in the studio. The faint sweetness of rain on hot pavement. Even the way my closet carries the weight of my fragrance long after I’ve left.
Scent is the most intimate form of memory. A smell can take you back to a moment you thought you had forgotten. I’ll catch the trace of a simple scent in the street and suddenly I’m nineteen again, walking through the East Village on a summer night, the whole city wet from a storm. The scent of burning palo santo and again, finding myself back in an old apartment I haven’t lived in for years, romanticising who I’ve been and who I will become.
What makes scent feel so personal is how it ties to people. The shirt you once buried your face in. The pillow that still smelled like someone days after they left. Even years later, the memory lives there — hidden in your body, waiting for the right reminder. No photograph or song does that in quite the same way.
One of the strongest reminders for me is the smell of the sea in the air, mixed with the sweet scent of summer coconut— Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil, to be exact. My mother used it religiously every summer, all summer long. I grew up by the coast in California, so it was technically summer about 10 months out of the year, but that slightly sweet coconut scent became the backdrop of my childhood days by the ocean, wet sand clinging to my skin, the air heavy with salt. When I smell it now, I’m not just reminded of the coast or the place that raised me, but I think of her. I see her stretched out in the sun, hair pulled up, warm and content, the first human I ever loved. That scent still follows me, whether I’m anywhere near the ocean or on a beach far across the world. It always brings me home.
Teakwood — another scent that’s stayed with me. It takes me back to the first place I ever shared with someone I loved. Our love — clumsy, imperfect — scent was the first thing we placed in our apartment, a house we made into a home. That scent became the atmosphere of our lives. After we broke apart, I think I blocked it out. The smell of teakwood didn’t register for years, as if ignoring the scent could erase the memory of us. I did it without acknowledgment.
But one day, years later, there it was. The sharpness of teakwood in the air stopped me cold. Suddenly, I was back in that apartment, back in late summer fading into fall, back in the glow of something young and innocent. It wasn’t a flood of memories — it was just one, clear and undeniable. Him. Me. Us. The silence of that moment was almost unbearable. It stung, but it also reminded me of who I was then, and how much of that person still lives inside me.
This is why scent and art belong together. Both are about memory, both are about emotion. A deep colored painting, a perfectly imperfect surface, a curved vessel — they don’t just decorate a room, they shift its atmosphere. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, they carry you back to a version of yourself you thought you’d forgotten.
Sometimes I wish I could return to those moments — the kid chasing waves, the person who thought love was as simple as lying together in a field of grass where time felt endless, but I can’t. Scent gives me a way to visit. And through my work, I hope to create the same for others: fragments that stop the world for a moment, and bring you back to exactly where you once were.
xx