SUPER SENSE

With a new work exploring togetherness through smell, Berlin artist Sissel Tolaas is leading us by the nose

- CHRISTOPHER STOCKS

Sissel Tolaas sniffs where others fear to tread. ‘When other people start throwing up,’ she says, ‘that’s when I start to work.’ The self-professed scientist of smell has created cheese from David Beckham’s sweat and finds the odour of ordure far more fascinating than what she calls ‘cover-up perfumes’. But she has also recreated the scent of extinct flowers and encapsulated the life story of a Douglas fir tree in a Dinesen plank.

Though she’s long been based in Berlin, Tolaas was born on the west coast of Norway, where, she recalls, ‘we always looked west, to America’. The young Tolaas, by contrast, looked east. At 17 she left squeaky-clean Scandinavia, first for Poland and then for Russia, to study organic chemistry and linguistics. ‘I need to be somewhere I feel uncomfortable,’ she says, ‘so I had to get away from the safety of home.’ For this, she couldn’t have chosen a better time and place; she arrived just as the old Soviet Union was coming apart at the seams. ‘Everything in Russia wasso political,’ she recalls. ‘Even in church, the priests would be preaching politics, not religion.’