As part of the Bowling Club artist collective in 2007, Andrew Putter staged 20 smells, a performance lecture in the style of a guided wine tasting. Guests were invited to interact with a curated kit of 20 scent samples as Putter narrated the invisible architecture of perfumery. At the core of his artistic research rests a curiosity about how the world works as a sum of its tiny parts and patterns; for example, scent molecules.

Revisiting and building on this olfactory inquiry, Six Smells (2025) offers a more intimate iteration of the past lecture, centering on the chemical indole and the orange tree. Found in both white flowers and human waste, indole inhabits the threshold between pleasure and repulsion, bloom and rot. Putter designs the performance lecture to mimic the shape of a chemical structure found in indole, the benzene ring, which appears as a hexagon with six atoms as connecting points. Staging a cyclical journey of engagement, he begins the process with a note on ‘how to smell’ – a technique for sipping scent without becoming overpowered, or suffering an overload that could inhibit the ability to detect further scents as the process unfolds. An interactive element of this performance lecture invites participants to draw their own personal associations to the scents that are presented in vials (Standing in an abandoned parking lot, nostalgic bath products, a scene from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), and playing in the clay in a forest riverbed are some examples of what participants recall). After sharing these evocations, both scientific and anecdotal information about the scent is revealed. The work affirms that even without knowing a molecule’s name, we might already have a sense of it in the world.

The six smells present in the kit are: 
indole (jasmine) 
petigrain 1 (bitter orange leaves)
petitgrain 2 (key lime leaves)
neroli (bitter orange blossom)
hyraeceum (dassie/hyrax excrement)
a synthesised perfume containing all the above ingredients

This work was conceived on the occasion of Fragrant Tests, a Goods project that conducted a series of curatorial experiments around smell and sensory engagement.