(Be)longings: Scent, Memory and Home at Empress Studios A collaborative installation for Kensington & Chelsea Art Week 2025
This weekend, I took part in a deeply personal collaboration for Kensington and Chelsea Art Week 2025, hosted at Empress Studios, the place I’m lucky to call my creative home, alongside a talented group of resident artists working across sculpture, painting, ceramics, and mixed media.
My contribution to the exhibition, in collaboration with ceramicist and visual artist @Michaelancholia, explored scent and its link to memory, emotion, and the feeling of home. Together, we created an interactive installation titled (Be)longings, with a first chapter called Hiraeth – a Welsh word that speaks of a longing for a home you can’t return to, or maybe never had.
Visitors were invited into the installation space to view evocative ceramic works, once discarded and anonymous, now reshaped, ornamented, and reimagined. Each carried echoes of place, time, and the fragility of identity.
Scent was my response to these forms.
I formulated a complex olfactory blend called Hiraeth, made with over 30 individual aromatic components. It was designed not to tell a single story, but to ask questions:
– What does this remind you of?
– How does it make you feel?
– Is it familiar? Or completely unknown?
Each visitor was guided through a sensory journey, beginning with the full Hiraeth blend. Then, five key aromatic elements from that blend were offered – a mix of single oils and compound accords. You could pause with each one. See what stood out. Notice what repelled or resonated.
Only after exploring these five elements did we return to the original Hiraeth blend. Now that you’d met some of its parts – had anything changed? Did you recognise something you hadn’t before? Had the scent become warmer, sharper, softer, clearer?
The point wasn’t to decode or analyse, it was to experience.
To notice how perception can shift once the unfamiliar becomes known. How your emotional landscape can alter through memory, awareness, or a sense of recognition.
Scent does this in a quiet but powerful way. It’s deeply personal, shaped by where you come from, who you’ve known, what you’ve lived through. Yet it also connects us, revealing patterns across cultures and time.
I loved speaking with visitors as they shared what surfaced for them. A grandparent’s garden. A place they’d forgotten. An ache they hadn’t expected. We carry so much within us, often unlocked by something as ephemeral as a scent.
This collaboration allowed me to show another side of my work as an aromatherapist. My practice is grounded in wellness and therapeutic support, but scent isn’t only medicinal, it’s also creative. My work moves between clinical aromatherapy, natural skincare, bespoke scent design, and immersive olfactory experiences like this one. What links them all is the aromatic plant: ancient, functional, emotional.
With Yatlina®, I create blends that fit into daily life with ease, using well-researched essential oils and natural aroma compounds. Whether diffused in a hospital room or explored in a gallery space, scent can comfort, challenge, or simply create presence.
(BE)LONGINGS / Hiraeth was about the scent of memory, of homes lost and found, of stories we hold in our bodies. Scent, like clay, can be broken and reformed. It doesn’t disappear – it transforms.
Thank you to everyone who came, engaged, shared, and reflected. And thank you to @Michaelancholia for the trust, creativity, and depth of thought that shaped this installation.
If you missed the event but would like to explore Hiraeth or learn more about how scent can be used in your own space or project, feel free to get in touch.
Coming soon: more scent-focused collaborations, workshops, and travels.
