“The First Frost”
The First Frost was created in response to an exhibition brief inviting figurative artists to work without the human figure while evoking scent through still life. Rather than approaching scent through florals or abundance, I chose to explore winter. What it smells like, what it represents, and how it might be experienced within a specific historical moment.
The objects it carries no longer serve function, but memory. Each of the twelve elements maps a life being shed:
1. A watch set to 6:05 a.m. (time, the threshold)
2. Lipstick (vanity, performed femininity)
3. A dance card and pencil (social obligation)
4. Spectacles (clarity, perception)
5. Scissors (severing ties with the past)
6. A memento mori hair locket (loss, remembrance)
7. A hairpin (beauty, self-defense)
8. A fob/seal (name, social status)
9. A perfume bottle (presence, identity through scent)
10. An open teardrop catcher (the end of mourning, a new beginning)
11. A coin purse (wealth)
12. Antique keys (domestic responsibility)
Materially, the surface reinforces the sensory experience. Marble powder creates a mineral dryness evoking snow. Diamond dust catches light like ice, and frost needles form crystalline structures. The aluminum panel acts as a cold, reflective ground, shifting with the viewer, while the chatelaine remains matte, hovering between surface and space.
“The First Frost”
70 × 50 × 2 cm
Acrylic, marble powder, diamond dust, frost needles, and 3 optical varnishes, on full aluminum panel
2026
Perfume Notes
Top: frost, ice, light
Heart: powder, iris, hair
Base: metal, time, patina
Set within the Art Nouveau period (1890s–1910s), the work centers on a silver chatelaine carrying the remnants of a life once lived. Historically worn at the waist, chatelaines held the tools of a woman’s daily life and evolved into visible expressions of identity, status, and role. They functioned as both utility and personal portrait, worn visibly in society.
This chatelaine suspends almost like an entity within itself. A presence, or a ghost of a self being left behind at the threshold of winter. It captures a moment of transition between night and day, autumn and winter, one chapter ending and another beginning.
Iris motifs carved into the metal echo powdery perfume notes, while the presence of hair (which does not decay), introduces a lingering and intimate trace of the body. Together with the metallic surface, the work forms an imagined scent that is cold, mineral, human, and suspended in time. The olfactory experience is veiled in a halo of frost and ice.
Winter here is not an ending, but a threshold.
The First Frost marks the instant a life is left behind, and another, undefined, begins
“I am not what I am, I am what I am becoming.” - Clarice Lispector
