This project’s the objective was to ‘escape from the smell of fish in Peckham Rye’. This stemmed from my journey out of Peckham Rye station to my home. I broke my ‘escape’ into two forms: desensitisation and masking.
I desensitised myself by forcing myself to handle fish bought from the local fishmongers. I used gyotaku printing to document this process. To futher intesify the process I decided to live with ‘shukti mas’, which is dried fish from Bengal that hangs from the ceiling in some fishmongers in Peckham. Finally I immersed myself in the process by putting myself in a fishmonger’s ‘shoes’ by making an apron and printing more fish onto it.
To mask the scent I researched the scent wheel for contrasting smells to rancid fish. From this research, I made my own perfume using citrus, floral and woody scents. My perfume consisted of fig tree stem, aniseed, cinamon bark, oak and lavender essential oils and lemon.