Veil

A candle just gone out, and the warmth still hanging in the room.

This began inside another formula, as an amber accord its maker kept returning to until it was pulled loose and left to stand on its own. The usual balance is flipped: aged Sumatran benzoin resinoid sits higher than labdanum, and no vanilla arrives to round the edges. Eucalyptus does the sharpening instead, green and cold.

Honey and beeswax absolute turn things warm and faintly sticky. Under them sit a dry spice of nutmeg absolute, a dark smoky line of birch tar, and musk closing it in.

Mist over heather, and colour rising in a face coming in from frost.

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.