NOSENSE

Immersive installation and olfactory objects, 2021

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Developed during the ACME Art Residency in London amid the pandemic, nOsense is an interactive olfactory installation investigating the fragmentary and elusive nature of memory and perception. The project reflects on how sensory traces – particularly smell – evoke incomplete yet emotionally charged recollections. Drawing on the notion of 'invisible art', nOsense translates intangible sensations into sculptural and olfactory forms, materialising what is usually beyond representation.

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The installation comprises four to six pieces of specially designed wooden furniture accommodating scented polymer clay sculptures shaped as draperies, each supporting glass objects under soft, shifting light. These objects act as vessels for memory, evoking the paradox of presence and absence.

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The forms recall sarcophagi and tomb-like pedestals – memorial structures that elevate and sacralise the act of remembering. This symbolic architecture transforms private recollection into ritual, suggesting both reverence and loss. The act of 'placing nothing on a pedestal' becomes a gesture of suspension, a monument to an empty year marked by uncertainty and isolation.

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The scented sculptures draw their titles and emotional resonance from John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, reflecting on the language of intangible feeling. Accompanying them is a series of linocuts inspired by Gilles Deleuze's Pli: Leibniz et le baroque, where the fold operates as both a visual and philosophical metaphor for perception, memory, and the continuous unfolding of the self.

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Immersed in a soundscape and light reminiscent of a church interior, nOsense becomes a poetic meditation on memory as ritual. Each fragment, preserved like a relic, questions what we choose to remember, what we lose, and how the invisible remains within us.

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Publications about project:

​2025 “Lisa Shtormit-Rommé”, Visual art journal, USA

2025 “Lisa Rommé. V 2”, Titan contemporary publishing, USA

2025 “Mystery, the Macabre, & Suspense in Contemporary Art”, Titan contemporary publishing, USA

2024 “10 Questions with Lisa Rommé”, Contemporary art magazine Altiba9, Spain