The work of Julie C. Fortier is built around the processes of olfactory perception and memory, creating evanescent landscapes in which narrativity is traversed by a memory or sensation that triggers an image. This vaporous quality of scents takes the form of perfumes, installations, drawings, and more.
The magic happens from the outside in.
The magic happens from the outside in. The subtle visual force that characterizes her pieces invites us to come closer in order to understand. It is in that approach that the senses come into play. The scents flow—fresh, acidic, bitter, sweet, bright, fruity—and permeate our olfactory system, awakening an endless array of sensations to begin an inner journey, motionless, into the archive of one’s own memories.
The magic happens from the outside in. The subtle visual force that characterizes her pieces invites us to come closer in order to understand. It is in that approach that the senses come into play. The scents flow—fresh, acidic, bitter, sweet, bright, fruity—and permeate our olfactory system, awakening an endless array of sensations to begin an inner journey, motionless, into the archive of one’s own memories.
Fortier floods an entire room with two sensory landscapes. The first, embodied in her principal piece, Que salive l’horizon, proposes to return elements of the natural landscape to a domestic scale, taking the form of an olfactory carpet with patterns coloured like geological strata, alternating colours and growing dense and voluminous, revealing a fissure from which stratified glass seeds emerge. Three scents punctuate this landscape-carpet, mingling in the space according to the unpredictable movements of visitors, who function as the key element in completing the meaning of the piece. The flow of the scents through the space summons other spaces, ghosts, and memories for those who allow themselves to be steeped in this outpouring of perfumes and sensations.
The other landscape she presents is the one evoked by the piece Immunité, in which the artist begins from the idea of solace as a manifestation of tenderness and from an awareness of the capacity of weeping to soothe and then bring about a sense of well-being through the production of endorphins and prolactin. Julie C. Fortier conceives this work as a corner of refuge, where we find these handmade porcelain tears, which retain an intentional porosity so as to diffuse the two specially devised perfumes—made with chemical extracts that promote the production of the aforementioned hormones in the human body, generating euphoric, calming, or immunostimulant effects. The work thus produces consequences that are at once aesthetic and chemical upon the body and the emotions.