Violin rosin. A football changing room. Rosewater masking a shipment of ketamine. All recollections triggered not by sight or sound, but by the sense of smell. The third example hints at who is poking around in the memory box, and where.
“It starts with a very simple premise,” says illustrator Michael O’Shaughnessy. “They smell a perfume, and I ask what it reminds them of. It can stop them in their tracks. Sometimes it’s like a light going on.”
O’Shaughnessy’s workshop participants are all serving time in prisons across the north of England. His collection of perfumes, a combination of classic French fragrances and bespoke concoctions blended by a collaborating perfumier, can offer a pointer to redemption, or even a brief escape: a moment of freedom sparked by memory.
