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Artist Statement
Painting has long been at the centre of my practice. This year I’ve begun exploring scent-making, a new and experimental thread that has reignited my work with fresh energies and colour palettes since taking ownership of sensory wellness label Nunchi Oils. The two practices now move in dialogue: painting and scent forming a shared language of gesture, feeling, memory, atmosphere, and place, both inspired by local landscape.
Much like painting with transparent oil glazes, blending perfume oils is an alchemy of layering and intuition: colours become notes, textures become accords, memory becomes material. Together, these practices allow me to distil the shifting spirit of landscape into sensory traces that linger beyond the canvas, felt through the whole body.
Theme: SENSE
SENSE is an exploration of landscape and my connection to place. Interpreting experiences I describe as the spirit of landscape; skin-tingling moments that capture the essence of place without depicting its direct views. Water gushing across exposed rock, wild winds through gum leaves, a luminescent oil slick, soft wispy clouds drifting or sunlight breaking through trees.
In this exhibition, both painting and scent become parallel languages, one visual, the other olfactory. Each painting carries a corresponding scent, installed beneath hand-blown glass cloches. Designed to be experienced together, the viewer is invited to smell the scent while viewing the artwork, enhancing the sensory experience of the show. A base note can ground us to the earth, while a brushstroke can open a horizon.
Together, they form a sensory dialogue that invites us to slow down and experience landscape through more than sight, to attune more deeply to colour, scent, and spirit.
— Hannah Nowlan, living in Black Rock, working in Red Hill, Victoria
Photographs by Bri Horne