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Trust Art is a social platform that is commissioning
ten public artworks over the next year. People are invited to
become shareholders with $1, share with interested friends, and renew culture.

Perfume Fountain for Humanity

A public project led by artist Anne McClain

Project Proposal

The creation of a perfume begins with a brief. For Anne’s project, that brief is to create a scent based on the experience of an act of humanity.

In September of 2009, Anne will travel to the city of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico with a group of twelve friends and perfumers and spend one week volunteering at the Casa de los Angeles, teaching art and visiting the local botanical garden at a day care center for children of single mothers. This act will serve as a tribute to a friend of Anne’s who volunteered at the Casa de los Angeles in 2003 and wrote of her experience, “I want to work with children..and do something to somehow improve their lives. I know that sometimes that means simply being 'present' to them..sharing a hug, holding them, smiling with them. We don't always have to do the big things to make a difference. If in my time of working with them I can benefit their families and the community in which they live I will be grateful.”

In Grasse, France, the capital of the perfume industry, Anne will create the Humanity scent by combining the techniques of modern perfumery and her studies in aromatherapy. Anne's intention is to use the inherent healing and transformative effects of natural plant materials to create a scent to uplift, encourage relaxation and making connections, stimulate compassion, and nurture a sense of letting go.

The Humanity scent will take the form of a fountain of perfumed water. A place of gathering often found in town squares (in Grasse, a fountain is located in the central square where the daily flower market takes place; in San Miguel de Allende the area where the fountain is located is called El Jardin), the fountain will serve as a place for communing, contemplation, and reflection. The creation of the fountain will be a collaborative effort between Anne, glass artist Alan Iwamura, and industrial designer Lance McGregor.

The fountain will be placed in a public space in New York, acting as a gathering place for people to experience the inspiration and meaning behind Humanity. The fountain is meant to transmit positive energy into the public. The question it will pose is: can good will be spread through scent?

About the Artist

Anne McClain is currently attending the Grasse Institute of Perfumery, taking courses in natural and synthetic raw materials, chemistry, and creation. She studied environmental studies, philosophy, and art at Brown University.

Anne fell into scent as an artistic medium through photography. Anne used photography in the same way she uses scents now - to flatten an experience or memory into something tangible. She also studied aromatherapy to understand the psychological effects the distillation of flowers, resins, barks, peels, leaves and other plant materials have on people.

Anne is passionate about revealing scent's power as artistic medium, and the unparalleled beauty of natural raw materials.

Artist's Past Work







Photography naturally lead Anne to scent artistry. Both mediums lend themselves to the pursuit of trying to capture moments and memories. Anne loves the dreamy, lingering quality that the memory of place can give over time. The excitement and displacement of travel leads one to an experience of being untethered. Anne likes to try and take those feelings, somewhere between illusion and reality, and to condense it, to flatten it, to create something so that she can remember what it feels like, always.




108, 2004
While spending four months living in Nepal, Anne studied with a rinpoche and was initiated into Tibetan Buddhism by a lama. This book recounts some of the insights into her spiritual practice, accompanied by photographs.




Transit/Home, 2005
For a period of a few years Anne travelled incessantly visiting Thailand, Indonesia, Baja California, Japan, and Hawaii, all the while thinking of someone she loved. They circled the globe on different paths, sometimes meeting and sometimes not. They took photographs influenced by each other and collected them into a book.




Kept, 2008
Stemming from her fascination with all things relating to memory, Anne was thinking about the phrase 'a kept woman'. She realized that not only would she most likely be keeping herself, she wanted it that way. At the time she was disappointed in love and conceived of a loverʼs gift to herself. she cut a hole through the center of a book about Paris, writing a story of lost love along the edges. In the void she placed a ring and the book became a jewelry box which she kept for herself.

Perfume - Left
Perfume - Right1

From The Artist

Perfume - Right2

Your Voice

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Friday
Sep182009

"The Essence of Humanity" by Patricia Cordero

ONLINE VERSION OF ARTICLE IS HERE
PDF VERSION IS HERE

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANITY

Scents are possibly one of the most difficult things to translate into something written or visual.  However, the New York artist Anne McClain has proposed to create a perfume that evokes the human, as well as change the attitude of those who wear it.

The essence, which will take the name Humanity, will flow from a fountain at a public park in Brooklyn, to transmit to passerby feelings of love and peace.

The installation forms part of Trust Art, an initiative founded by Seth Aylmer and Jose Serrano-Reyes, as a kind of stock market for art, in which common citizens become shareholders with as little as one dollar towards the realization of ten projects by emerging artists.

McClain studied the basic principles of perfumery at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery, in the south of France, and combined it with her knowledge of aromatherapy.

"To make perfumes based on an act of social consciousness has become something more important than I had imagined," she says in the interview.

To approach the idea of what it means to be human, McClain spent a week as a volunteer at the Casa de los Angeles, in San Miguel de Allende, a day care center for orphans and children of women who come to sell their wares at the local market.

"To be with these children made me think differently about our world.  When you help someone and separate your own goals from all of that you think of humanity in a broader sense."

The artist took some herbs from San Miguel de Allende, which will be integrated into the essence she is working on.

With the Humanity fragrance, McClain seeks to break the artificial, superficial, sensual, and glamorous image that the perfume industry sells.

"It's a different plane of reality.  When you see a commerciial for some perfume you ask yourself 'What is this?'  Can we create something that inspires this industry to think differently about what it's doing, and that provokes the social consciousness of the world we live in, instead of that material, sexual, fantasy that exists on a different level?" asks Jose Serrano-Reyes.

The fountain that McClain plans to install in Brooklyn will be made of glass, conceived by glass artist Alan Iwamura and the industrial designer Lance McGregor.

"The fountain will be a mechanism for something that started out as an act of good will and inspires contemplation and meditation," adds Serrano-Reyes.

McClain thinks about perfume in a philosophical way, using its relationship to aromatherapy as a departure point; scent reflects people's personalities, as well as evoking certain moments or emotions.

If the perfume industry can create more personal fragrances, and guided more towards the artisanal, as is happening in fashion and music, it be something else," she says.

The photographer trusts that this essence can become a symbol for a generation of artists that think about the social and participatory value of art, more than how much money can be made from the piece.

The glass sculpture will be installed in the public space in Brooklyn for between three and six months and will then be auctioned, returning value to every shareholder invested in the project.

DateSeptember 18, 2009 at 21:45 | Comment1 Comment

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