Intra Venus

Carter Weeks Maddox - Chronotope
2021
Eau de Parfum

Citationals Series No. 1: A Perfume for Hannah Wilke

Carter: This piece of memento mori takes its name from the breathtaking and frequently hilarious body of work by my favorite artist, Hannah Wilke, depicting her experience of physical decline due to the lymphoma and intravenous chemotherapy that caused her early death when she was just 52. In the perfume, a photorealistic hyacinth rendered from yarrow and mastic—the latter of which is a citation of Wilke’s early artwork, for which she regularly used chewing gum as a sculptural material—is infected with poison bulb, a lethal amaryllis that shares a molecule with human breath post-chemo. This molecule also holds significance within my family, as governments mandated it be added to natural gas lines in the wake of a school explosion that killed several of my relatives. And as a final note, my mother swears it captures the scent of her mother, my grandmother, who passed just as I started work on the formula.

Notes: Blue hyacinth, blue yarrow, wasabi, mastic, poison bulb (swamp lily), damp marshes, cedar moss, cyclamen, amaryllis, ribes mercaptan, jasmine auriculatum, cypress leaves, cypress wood absolute, hinoki wood.