An affirmation of the creative process

Foreword by Genevieve Leong
Written for The Scentscape Dossier: A Design Study – a publication by A Thing of Sense

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I have long devoted my practice to the visualising of the intangible – which I’d like to define as the quiet space where thoughts dwell before they begin to take form. Perhaps an endeavour such as this will always be deemed unattainable, as these almost-thoughts and half-articulated-sentences might cease to exist even before we embrace their essences. Yet I press on anyway.

When I came to know A Thing of Sense, it had been as though I uncovered an entire entity that sought to speak about this intangibility that I have so often pursued. Through imagined moods, atmospheric qualities of sound and space, and deliciously descriptive scent notes, A Thing of Sense has added on to me a whole lot of possibility in expanding this ever-growing landscape of the invisible. Scent, in its simultaneous elusiveness and omnipresence, has always had the uncanny ability to connect us to the world in a manner that precedes language, or understanding.

Hence, to commemorate and celebrate the articulated atmospheres that A Thing of Sense has dreamt up for our partaking, this short essay is my pursuit in making sense of – although never in linearity despite my sincere attempts at structure and category – how a beautiful half-thought might unfold. It also seeks to serve as a reminder for us to hold on to and cultivate that drifting word, or that indeterminate emotion, such that we might hold the world together in ways we can sense but never fully grasp.

  • The beginning of a sentiment

    A couple of weeks ago I started having breakfast again. It has in fact been years since I’ve stopped having breakfast, but lately, this first bite of taste at the rise of a new day has delighted me endlessly.

    I do not eat because I am hungry, but because I seek a comfort that holds and grounds me in the wee hours of the morning, when I awake before the first dance of the sun, when it seems the moon still rests her gaze upon me. A comfort that might be able to sizzle the vertigo that I often experience when my eyes have yet to give in to gravity, much like the optimism of a skylight, or the gentleness of a windowsill. I imagine a scent that retains me to this space, only to bring me but closer.

    It is precisely in this state of mild subconscious that I am able to unequivocally exhale an array of starting points, ideas that seemingly stream uncontrollably from my being. It does not quite matter to me if or not they are meaningless, for their overwhelming urgency draws me to their various forms of enchantment. On the occasion of this delight, I feel impossibilities converge, albeit slowly.

  • The intangibility of process

    A Thing of Sense began quite specifically: The idea of a particular scent was dreamt up with no detail or context, no description or articulation – and then began the persistent search for that scent without an assurance of ever finding it. The creative process sees us throw ourselves into a spiral of scribbled words, lukewarm concepts, ever-changing emotions, essences, directions – all in hopes of making sense of this senseless idea that we are convinced has delighted us so.

    In these occurrences of uncertainty where time seems to turn stale, I look to collecting affinities. I think of affinity as the invisible thread that binds us to the things we hold dear – be it a person, an object or a word – a subtle force that draws us near without rhyme or reason. It is the way our fingers linger on a fabric that feels just right, a specific stringing of words that elicits an image so tender, the pull towards a scent that stirs memories long forgotten, the constellation of objects in a space that constitutes a home (our home), the quiet connection we feel with a place or moment that resonates deep within. Affinity is not chosen, but discovered; it is the heart recognising something familiar that tingles at us just so, a soft knowing that transcends logic, a kinship.

    Sometimes process forces us to enter unfinished states where ideas seem to culminate without resolution, bringing us on a road to build uncountable bridges without knowing where they intersect. But I urge you to trust that they eventually do, just as how a dove that soars always has her capacity to return in spite of time lost. I take comfort in the knowing that sometimes we’d go the distance for a single sunset.

  • The brink of possibility

    My body often stirs right before the arrival of a resolution. Some might call this coincidence, and others, intuition. I never quite had a liking for the word intuition, for it seems to suggest that certain favourable happenings might occur by luck, chance, or feeling. I’d much rather like to believe that it is our accumulated affinities that have brought us here, to the space of the Almost.

    This very morning I went for a walk, as I often do. Through the piles of dirt and sand particles scattered along the gravel, I noticed an object glistening – it seemed to be sleeping. It was a piece of broken glass, and it was a pale green. I caught a whiff of its elusive scent, and I am most convinced it smelled of something in between the woody freshness of cypress and the distinctive sweetness of a pear. The scent of growth, perhaps, and of ripening. I marvel at the fact that green grows in the wildest and most uninhabitable places, akin to an encapsulation of our dreams, our potential energy, our capacities. I picked up the shard of glass and slipped it in my pocket.

    Almost there, almost, I'm certain, we’re close.

    I look out the window and I’m on a train. A train ride so fast that the colours run and distort like particles into a sea of green. A warm green this time; an olive. Right in this moment, until our eyes adjust themselves to the next glimpse of a landscape, we relish in this holding of breath, this glimmer of possibility, this universality of feeling.

  • Crystallisation

    Suppose I believe in magic, suppose I believe in faith. Suppose that clarity lives generously in the night sky and creeps into our beings without our knowing, in the most diffused of ways.

    Note after note, through a unified sensibility exercised through countless disappointed fates, the scribbles and cancellations in our drafts begin to converge, and the coagulated scent starts to take shape. Here, a crystallisation happens so instantaneously that a distinct and surreal disbelief accompanies this rapidness of fruition. Was that the closest rendition of magic that I could have experienced? How did these inconsistencies iron themselves out; how did something so whole rise from the fragments of my struggle? Yet the work unabashedly declares itself as an embodiment of persistence, and of faith; a testament to the initial enchantment it had when it was but a grain of sand.

    Maybe it takes our endless days to establish complexity, maybe the meek stubbornly refuses predictability, or maybe, maturity only fully emerges in a saturation of green.

    In light of things that naturally fall into place, I hope we always remember that warmness transitions through a slow burn.