Ex-Libris

A love letter once named a library and a Friday afternoon.

The library was Birmingham Central, a strange brutalist block of concrete, since torn down. Its maker spent teenage years there reading poetry that held no real interest, then wrote to a crush naming the time and the place. Worn carpet underfoot, polished wooden furniture, the stillness of a reading room.

Rosemary and neroli arrive green and a little bitter, like herbs pulled apart in the hand. Warm wood sits under that, with the dry sweetness of old paper and violets faded almost out. Haitian vetiver and patchouli coeur settle everything into dust and calm.

It smells like waiting for someone in a room that no longer exists.

Clara Weale makes Early Modern by hand in Glasgow, Scotland, in batches small enough to count. The approach is playful.

The work is openly concerned with materiality. Materials are named for what they physically are rather than dressed up, and each release keeps paring itself back toward its most gestural form.

What she is after is recognition without a source, the sense of having smelled something before without being able to say where.