We’re thrilled to announce that Sarah Baker has been invited to serve as a judge for the 5th Annual Golden Pears, also known as the Art and Olfaction Awards. Sarah will serve on a panel of six judges for the Sadakichi Award for Experimental Work with Scent, selecting five finalists and one winner.
The AO Awards will take place on April 21, 2018 at The Tabernacle, in London's Notting Hill. The Golden Pears are a program of The Institute for Art and Olfaction, a non-profit organization based in Los Angeles, USA. The finalists will be announced in March at Esxence in Milan.
As the IAO announcement explains, “Awarded to just four perfumes and one experimental project a year, The Golden Pears is designed to raise interest and awareness for independent and artisan perfumers - and experimental practitioners with scent - from all countries. By shining a spotlight on perfumery’s most outstanding creators, we hope to help generate support for independent practices in perfumery as a whole.” Awards are presented in five categories: The Artisan Pefume Award, the Independent Perfume Award, the Aftel Award for Handmade Perfume, the Contribution to Scent Culture Award, and the Sadakichi Award for Experimental Work with Scent.
The Sadakichi Award is for “creative or experimental practitioners who make unconventional use of scent, that takes it out of the domain of traditional perfumery. The Sadakichi Award honors the work of people who engage with scent outside of the realm of commercial perfumery.”
There is a wonderful back story to the Sadakichi Award, as profiled in The New Yorker:
“It’s named in honor of a miserable failure,” Saskia Wilson-Brown, the founder of the Institute for Art and Olfaction, told me. That failure was the German-Japanese poet and critic Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, who staged the world’s first scent concert, in 1902. Using the recently invented electric fan, Hartmann planned to take his New York audience on an imaginary journey to Japan. The performance was supposed to last sixteen minutes; the audience booed him offstage after four. “He looked weird and he was effete and a philosopher,” Wilson-Brown said. “Poor guy—he kind of sashayed out in a kimono and the audience was just like, ‘What the hell is this?’ ”
As Sarah Baker is an artist herself, we really identify with the risk-taking spirit of Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, and we certainly applaud all things experimental and unconventional at Sarah Baker Perfumes!
Sarah is honored to be in such good company, with fellow judges Ashraf Osman (Switzerland), Caro Verbeek (The Netherlands), Darin Klein (USA), Simon Niedenthal (Sweden) and Zoe Crosher (USA).
Past winners of the Sadakichi Award include Osmodrama Berlin / Smeller 2.0 (by Wolfgang Georgsdorf of Germany with perfumer: Geza Schön, 2017), Century’s Breath (by Cat Jones, 2016), and Famous Deaths (by Marcel van Brakel, Frederik Duerinck, Wander Eikelboom, and Mark Meeuwenoord, 2015).
Sarah Baker Perfumes has been fortunate to partner with the Institute for Art & Olfaction for several prior projects, including a presentation at the 2017 IAO Experimental Scent Summit in Berlin, the April 2016 Sarah Baker Perfumes exhibition and perfume launch at the IAO in Los Angeles, as well as an exhibition at the AIX Scent Fair at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The IAO is a wonderful organization, and it is a particular honor to be invited to participate as a judge.
Follow the fun on Twitter @AOAwards and Instagram @artandolfaction using #AOAwards.
Meanwhile, it’s time for this New Yorker to book her flights to London.
Looking forward to April,
Ariel
Team Sarah Baker Perfumes