"What is particularly striking about smell is that it is not simply about discerning and recognizing an odour; a spectrum of experiences and emotions that are associated a particular smell comes to memory along with each smell. For this matter, it is a very subjective experience that is difficult to describe with words. Therefore, the sense of smell breaks the traditional separations we place within the world because the air carries a blend of odours that one cannot avoid: pleasant smells with unpleasant ones, known with unknown ones, intimate smells with the ones that are devised to cover them up.
Smells act as unifying elements between imagination, desire, the past and the future. They transgress the boundaries of space and time, lingering like a powerful projection of the past onto the present.
In this light, the marginalisation of smell could be largely due to its ability to transgress personal boundaries and to stir up memories and emotions."
"Guy Brett observes that Clark “produced many devices to dissolve the visual sense into an awareness of the body”. Her works involve specially designed hoods and suits that are intended to enhance the senses of their participants, favouring smell and touch over sight. She treated the body and mind as a unity and disregarded the divisions between artist and audience. For her, the artistic object is co-created by the artist and the participant, acquiring meaning and structure only through interaction.
Lygia Clark explained that the emphasis on her work shifts from the artistic object to experience and from matter to the surrounding space, the “empty-full” surrounding an object and filling a body."
"There is a strong political tone emerging from these artworks, especially if one considers the fact that the artist’s home country, Brazil, was under a military dictatorship when they were created. However, there is also a positive charge within those works, despite the feeling of confinement. The stimulation of the other senses –rather than vision- creates a similar experience to when one stays within the darkness for too long, and one’s eyes begin to discern things that were initially invisible. In these series, the artwork is not the object, but the new sensations that it produces to the viewer."
"In the work of Lygia Clark, the connection of the senses to memory and emotion became an even stronger focus during her later work. From the 1970s and on, the artist employed her Relational Objects –as she named these hoods and suits- in healing processes, to treat patients with psychological problems. Thus, she restored the link between art and medicine, which was present in ancient cultures, like the Greek world –where the music was seen as a magical means of purification and healing- and the Chinese culture, where the concept of Chi runs through the fields of philosophy, medicine and art. As the artist revealed, the therapeutic aspect of her work is aimed to recover a notion of the body’s “plenitude”."
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