Second Skin

Second Skin begins with a question: what can an image be when you no longer have a photograph? Comprising twelve handmade perfumes developed in collaboration with Bios Apothecary, Brooklyn, the installation offers a portrait shaped through memory and scent rather than visual likeness. Each fragrance is drawn from moments I shared with my mother, memories that were lived but never photographed and could only be carried in the body.

When encountered, these scents do not present a fixed image. Instead, they activate the viewer’s own memory and imagination, allowing the brain to construct an image uniquely its own. In a world saturated with visual data, scent becomes a quieter trigger, one that invites the mind to fill in absence. These become “mental photographs,” intimate and unstable images that shift with personal experience, emotion, and time. Second Skin invites viewers to experience memory not through what is seen, but through what is felt, recalled, and internally formed, an image held only by the one who smells it.

INSTALLATION VIEWS