Borrowed Feathers — Olfactory Objects

Borrowed Feathers — Olfactory Objects extends the emotional landscape of the

Borrowed Feathers series into the realm of scent, touch, and sensory memory. This body of work explores the fragility of identity through sculptural vessels—objects that echo the invisible exchanges of relationship, emotional imprint, and the subtle traces we leave on one another.

Tom had an extraordinary sensitivity to the world. His sense of smell, touch, and intuitive physical awareness shaped how he moved through space. He could hold a piece of pottery and feel its history, sense tension in my shoulder and release it, or identify a material’s composition through tactile perception alone. His inner world—complex, wounded, perceptive—expressed itself through this heightened sensory intelligence.

These olfactory objects honor that dimension of him.

Each vessel is conceived as an emotional container: a body that holds the residues of connection, longing, illusion, or intimacy. The sculptural forms take cues from pottery—an art both of containment and fragility—which he and I both loved. Their silhouettes are intentionally imperfect, echoing the imbalance between how we present ourselves and what we contain internally.

In these works, scent becomes narrative. Aroma is rarely given space in visual art, yet it is one of the most emotionally direct senses—the one that bypasses cognition and speaks to memory, loss, desire, and fear. These vessels imagine scents as emotional states: the sweetness of comfort, the metallic sharpness of anxiety, the smoky residue of betrayal, the earthiness of grief.

The objects also speak to touch—the fingerprints we leave on one another through friendship, love, avoidance, dependency, or longing. These bottles are not meant to hold perfume; they are prototypes of emotional architecture, echoing the ways we attempt to contain what cannot truly be contained.

Borrowed Feathers — Olfactory Objects becomes, in this way, a sculptural archive of intimacy.

A study in the porous boundaries between people.

A record of emotional scent trails left behind after relationships collapse, transform, or burn away.

The vessels trace what Tom borrowed from the world, what he could not hold, and what remained after his absence.

They are memorials not of death, but of the sensitivity that made him who he was.