A swallow does not make a summer


Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University.

In 2017, Manon Bellet began field research to extract scents from specific areas of the Mississippi Delta region affected by coastal erosion. She sampled natural flora and fauna, water and soil and sentimental objects of the people who lived there. Through her research and studio practice, Bellet creates a multisensory body of work that plays with what we see, hear, smell and feel.
Through the beauty of fragrance, this exhibition explores Bellet’s concern with landscapes lost through the effects of time, global warming, or urban sprawl. As smells often do, Bellet’s scent sculptures evoke unique memories. Still, these detached odors allow for a shared journey, creating new, collective remembrances Bellet associates with extinction, risk, or loss.

A Swallow Does Not Make a Summer is the second iteration in the Radical Naturalism series of exhibitions. Contemporary artists are invited as guest curators to work with Auburn University’s collections and present representations of the natural world. Alongside her pieces, Bellet selected prints by John James Audubon and Warrington Colescott to pair with specimens from Auburn’s Museum of Natural History.

—Aaron Levy Garvey, curator at The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, at Auburn University

—Photography: Mason Williams courtesy of The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, at Auburn University

     

View of the show with a selection 5 works of the collection and my audio piece.

 

View of the show with a selection of 4 works from the collection and my scent piece presented on a box in a pedestal.

 

Golden waste: scent piece of an extraction of water and dirt close to Delacroix Parish, Louisiana.

 

Visitors smelling the scent work

 

Visitors smelling the scent work

 

View of the series " native" 8 cyanotypes made with native and non native plants from Louisiana.