(BE)LONGING/S
An interactive art installation in collaboration with @Michaelancholia as part of Kensington & Chelsea Art Week 2025
About (Be)longings Project 1.0: Hiraeth
Sharing strength and fragility, clay and scent are vessels of memory. Their identity can be shaped, broken, and reshaped, remembered, forgotten. Materiality is their very essence, carrying emotional residue: good and bad. They invite a second look, refusing neat endings, demanding complex beginnings.
Pan-cultural casualties, and survivors of time and (dis)placement for millennia – both, indelibly mirror the complexity of human experience and identity. They can shape us, as much as we can break them: the animate, the inanimate, place, and memory, become one and many, ad infinitum.
In this multidisciplinary collaboration, award winning aromatherapist Yasmine ElGhamrawy responds with an olfactory thread, to the critical and visual inquiry on the uncanny, notions of ‘home’, ornamentation, materiality, and displacement, by mixed media artist, ceramicist, and researcher, @Michaelancholia. The interactive art installation pictures and 'scents’ the ineffable inter-connectivity between displaced and ‘found’ objects loaded with esoteric dialects of time, place, and the self: (be)longing/s of ‘home’.
Figurative and ornamental ceramic artefacts populate this liminal space we call ‘home’; thrown, discarded pots made by anonymous hands destined for clay reclaim, are re-sculpted, abstractly recreated and (un)recognisable.
Yasmine ElGhamrawy’s fecund archive of precious oils, disrupt and harmonise the space, and the objects within, manipulated, teased, and celebrated in the moment, for what they have now become.
As part of Kensington & Chelsea Art Week 2025/Fuse, experience a mixed media multidisciplinary immersive s(c)en(t)sorial art installation.
Enter the strange (un)familiarity of ‘home’ and (be)longing/s through the olfactory, and objets decoratifs.
At: Empress Open Studios
Saturday 28th & Sunday 29th June 2025 11am-5pm
Admission free.
Private View at no. 11: Friday 27th June 6pm-8pm
What do I know here? What can I trust, what do I remember, why is this (un)familiar, what do I feel?
People
@Michaelancholia is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in exploring identity politics, displacement, and the complex relationships between body, object, place, and time. With a background in film, brand strategy, and luxury accessories design, she trained in Footwear & Accessories at Cordwainers College, London College of Fashion: UAL, and spent two decades designing for global lifestyle brands in London and NY.
Transitioning into fine art, she earned a Masters in Illustration and Visual Media from London College of Communication: UAL, and a UAL-accredited diploma in Ceramics. Through material and technical experimentation, @Michaelancholia creates palimpsestic visual echoes that disrupt ceramics, craft, figurative art, code, and time-based media. Her multidisciplinary research shapes her practice informed by critical inquiry into the uncanny, displacement, notions of 'home', belonging, materiality, and ornamentation.
Collaborative projects have included working with and for The British Museum, The Royal Academy of Arts, Mulberry, V&A, and Stephen Walters & Sons Limited.
She has devised and contributed to humanitarian projects with neuropsychologists from King’s College London, Children and War UK, and Queen Mary University, on art projects for trauma-affected child refugees and asylum seekers, co-authoring a paper on the benefits of community art for war-displaced children.
Recent exhibitions include Messums West Gallery’s Plates with Purpose group show, and Kensington and Chelsea Art Week 2024, where her work was paired with immersive music by Sam Antony Mitchell of Longheads.
Yasmine ElGhamrawy is a London-based clinical aromatherapist and scent practitioner whose work explores the sensory and therapeutic roles of aromatic plants across cultures. She blends scientific research with traditional knowledge to create functional scent compositions that support emotional and physical well-being.
Certified in aromatherapy, natural skincare formulation, and therapeutic perfumery, Yasmine draws on essential oil chemistry, plant energetics, and the influence of cultivation, harvest and place on aromatic character. Her practice spans clinical aromatherapy, bespoke scent formulation, and sensory design, focusing on how aroma supports memory, atmosphere, and emotional response.
Through Yatlina®, she offers evidence-based solutions using diffusion and inhalation, alongside bespoke olfactory blends crafted from natural extracts and aroma molecules designed to evoke complex emotional landscapes and sensory memory. Yasmine works across clinical care and cultural projects. Through workshops, seasonal rituals, and her Scentsational Travels programme, she shares the role of scent in daily life, ritual, and remembrance, connecting people to plants, places, and their own sense of presence. She is a registered and certified practitioner in the UK, EU, and USA, and represents the UK for the Alliance of International Aromatherapists (AIA).
