Bobbie Burgers: Close Up: Enfleurage

The thematic origins of an exhibition are found in the most strange and wonderful ways. Sometimes they are ideas that have circulated in my work for my entire career, primed to be drawn out and examined more closely; other times, they are found in art history, cultural commentary, or in my own life and relationships. Then there are exhibitions like this one, where just at the right moment, while I’m in that liminal zone between shows, beginning a new body of work and ruminating on where it will go, something will appear, catch the imagination, and set the course. In this case, the title of a book on a friend’s coffee table: the Atlas of Perfumed Botany.

It's a book that both in title and content –and despite being published fairly recently– evokes a time of apothecaries and alchemy, detailing the many ways we extract and employ scents from seeds, barks, leaves, roots and flowers for use in perfumery. In one technique, called enfleurage, petals are carefully layered in an odourless fat to extract scent over days, and then removed and replaced with fresh flowers until a concentrated scent is captured. Reading about the difficulty of isolating aromas from natural materials, I started to draw parallels between the techniques and processes of perfumery and the work I was producing in the studio.

The most beautiful things are benefitted by a subtle grittiness, a counterpoint that lends complexity and endurance to a work.

This current body of work is about complexity and density. The sheer amount of raw material needed to obtain a small vial of essence is reflected in the crush of petals on canvas. The alchemy of rounding out a scent with top, heart and base notes is how I view the array of materials and techniques layered into a work.