International Perfumer Panel

sold out

Wed 21 Jun 2017

19.00-21.00

£12.00 / £10.00 conc

Concession price tickets apply to over 60s, teachers, tutors, disabled, students, under 16s and registered unwaged. You will need to bring relevant ID to verify your status.

Screening Room

South Wing

Part of Perfume

Join the curators of Perfume for an evening discussing the showcasing of scents with three of the exhibition's key contributors.

Introduced by co-curators Claire Catterall and Lizzie Ostrom who will chair the discussion, this talk offers a unique insight into the process and practicalities behind the exhibition as well as the inspiration, curatorial vision and stories from lifelong obsessions with perfume.

The curators will be joined by three perfumers at the forefront of the experimental scene who feature in Perfume. Mark Buxton of Comme Des Garçons whose contribution Comme des Garçons 2 was created with the vision of emulating the “smell of a swimming pool of ink” but maintains an understated wearability. Alongside him Antoine Lie, whose infamous and intentionally divisive Secretions Magnifique released by Etat Libre d’Orange evokes notes of sweat, milk and ultimately semen and questions what we desire and expect from a perfume.

Completing the panel will be David Seth Moltz who alongside his wife Kavi Moltz runs the DS & Durga brand and creates scents that are “fragments of half-remembered myths and imaginary landscapes that invite one to explore.” Their featured perfume El Cosmico conjures the desert landscape of Marfa, a Texas city near the Mexico border home to a teepee based community of artists.

Lizzie Ostrom
Aka Odette Toilette, Lizzie has been running olfactory events linking the arts of the more well represented senses such as film and music with that of scent since 2010. Her sensorial events have explored such themes as Fragrance and Male Identity, the history of perfume advertising and her Scent Speakeasy which presented prohibited perfumes that were; banned for having restricted ingredients, created by underground perfumers or were simply too unpalatable for the commercial market. Lizzie’s first book Perfume: A Century of Scent which tells the story of 100 perfumes and their perfumers from 1900 - 2000 was published by Hutchinson in 2015.

Claire Catterall
Claire is Senior Curator of exhibitions at Somerset House and co-curated Perfume with Lizzie Ostrom. Trained as a design historian, with an MA from the Royal College of Art, Claire worked as an independent curator throughout the 90s and was responsible for a number of high-profile exhibitions including Powerhouse:UK: British Creativity Now in Horse Guards Parade (1998); Stealing Beauty: British Design Now at the Institute of Contemporary Art (1999); and Food: Design and Culture (1999) for Glasgow 1999. At Somerset House she has overseen a wide range of popular exhibitions including; Tim Walker Storyteller (2012); Valentino: Master of Couture (2012); Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!(2013) and Big Bang Data (2015).

Mark Buxton
Born in Derby, educated at the Haarmann & Reimer perfumery school in Germany and now based in Paris, Mark Buxton currently works for Symrise and says he "entered the world of perfumery by pure hazard". Famed for his iconoclastic Comme des Garçons 2 and his irreverent, outlandish style Mark has created a range of perfumes for Givenchy, Comme des Garçons and Paco Rabanne founded his own perfumery in 2009 and in 2012 formed Nose, a personalised service that will diagnose your ideal perfume.

Antoine Lie
Born in Strasbourg Antoine studied Chemistry before attending the Givaudin perfume school where he stayed until 2011. Now at Takasago, Japans first manufacturer of perfume ingredients he has worked on a number of mainstream products for Davidoff, Paul Smith and Comme des Garçons alongside avant-garde fragrances for provocative perfume house Etat Libre d’Orange. His work here includes collaborations with the Tom of Finland foundation and the seminal Secretions Magnifique.

David Seth Moltz
Born in New England Moltz recalls his earliest sensory memories as the smell of the woods and the sea just 10 minutes from his family home. After attending film school at Boston University and subsequently moving to Brooklyn he is now one half of perfume house DS & Durga with his wife Kova Moltz who suggested the venture after seeing David tinkering with old fragrance recipes. Founded in 2008 DS & Durga have since released a range of Perfumes that encapsulate a specific snapshot in time, space or memory.