The Great Pretender
Since around 2021 or 2022, I have called myself an artist. I am an artist, because I make art. I am an artist now and I was an artist before I even exhibited my art. However, it is still very difficult for me to call myself an artist and not feel like a phony. I stopped myself, quite early on, from squirming when I said it. I have learned to say it as a factual statement, smoothly and unashamedly, but it took practise and is an ongoing battle. This is not at all uncommon for artists who forged their practice separate to their bread-and-butter career. For artists like myself, who did not go through the art school pipeline, it is extra tricky.
I make art using scented materials. Am I a perfumer? Yes, factually, I create perfumes. I create perfumes for people and events and skincare companies and for the sake of my own scientific practice.
Combine these two, and I am an olfactory artist. I said this once, to a prominent perfumer, at an art exhibition opening where they had created a scent for the show. Someone introduced me as a fellow perfume artist and they said, “Oh? Where have you exhibited?” I was shocked that my credentials had been demanded so abruptly and without any sort of preambular chit-chat. Why did it matter? Wouldn’t I still be a scent artist if I were making things and not exhibiting them? As it was, I had just gotten back from exhibiting my scented-painting body of work Metropolis Oasis in Korea. So I said that. The perfumer nodded and turned away, addressing someone else.
In 2023 (the same year as the above) I went into the Libertine Parfumerie store in Paddington, excited that such a lovely perfume store was open and flourishing in Sydney. I knew from having attended the opening that there was a room out the back of the store, beautifully decked out and ready for intimate events. Metropolis Oasis was about to open in Sydney and I went in there to see if I could hire the space for an intimate Collector’s Preview before the opening. I asked for the manager and the person I spoke to affirmed that they were indeed 1iC. I asked about the annex, they asked what I wanted to use it for; “We only hire it out on a case-by-case basis.” Sure, that’s fine. I explained Metropolis Oasis, and they said, “Where did you learn to do that?”
This question, much like “Where have you exhibited?” struck me as irrelevant. As before, I responded automatically.
“Nowhere – I invented it.”
Their face suddenly took on a look of mild disgust. “Feel free to leave your card and we’ll let you know.”
I knew in that moment that they had no intention of leasing the space to me for an evening. I suspected, and was correct, that they also had no intention of “letting me know.”
What should I have said? The National Art School? Grasse Institute of Perfumery? What would have validated the idea of scented paintings for the manager? Why was the fact that I had an exhibition not enough? What is so repulsive about being self-taught?
Despite my exasperation with, and eschewing of, such misplaced snobbery, things like this have subconsciously weighed on my soul. As I said to Katrina Cochrane of Archer Farrar, I get far more noes than yeses. Despite forging on, and doing more shows of scented paintings and other scented media, despite being awarded an artist residency, despite doing radio interviews and podcasts, despite having clients and collectors, despite being invited to pitch to private members’ clubs, I still have doubts that subsume my self-identity. Am I an artist? Am I talented? Am I skilled? Do people want me in their spaces? I am embarrassed to admit that these noes and demands for validity have had such long-term effects on me. I hate that I also need external validation, consistently. I don’t know why my achievements have an expiry date in my brain.
Dame Tracey Emin is doing the podcast circuit because of her major retrospective at the Tate Britain. I am listening to all of her interviews because I find her endlessly inspiring. She is someone who makes art for its own sake, because she has to, and in total disregard as to whether it is “successful” or not. This is my dream. I am so ravaged by the need to appeal to people. Not everyone, but anyone. I can’t make something and not care if no one likes it. I want people – someone, anyone – to like things I have made. I love to share beauty. I love to make things that bring other people joy. The fact that I have artworks – in perfume form, visual form, and olfacto-visual form – sitting hidden away in storage makes me deeply unhappy, and makes me question whether I am an artist if my creations are just existing in purgatory.
I have a conviction (a strong one, by the way) that art should not be free. Not ever. Never. A gift, of course, is fine, but generally I don’t believe that something crafted by human hands and brains, with effort and/or talent and/or time and/or skill, should be free. Art should either be exchanged or paid for. Art materials and perfume materials are shockingly expensive. And my foul and disgusting self-taught methods took me months and months and hundreds of prototypes and thousands of dollars.
And so my poor creations remain stored in darkness because I won’t degrade them by giving them away, and I remain discouraged by the Sydney attitude to my practice.
In 2024 I sat on the balcony of a Hanoi hotel room, at 10pm and surrounded by jasmine and heavy humidity, and stripped my soul raw, trying to find the core of why I do this. I could make ugly, violent art about my illness; I could create a gallon of perfume and head to the markets to flog it to tourists. Of course, I never will. Well, not the markets part anyway. My point is that the creation of funny little worlds is what I do. I so badly wish I could be more business-minded, or conversely that I could put up half-naked videos of me recklessly painting my pain away like a real artist. Instead I sit at my desk, which is sometimes a perfume station and sometimes a slab for rolling clay, and work away constructing stories to tell in ways that I pathetically taught myself.
Look, I’ll keep trying to improve my digital content. I’ll try to be more businesslike and opportunistic. I will. There’s so much I want to do. It’s a slow wade upstream, but I’ll keep trying. In the meantime, sorry, you just get me as I am, the phony artist-pretender.
