To sculpt the invisible | The Press

The Perfumer’s Barn is a mess of well-ordered smells. The place is strewn with bottles, notebooks, bouquets of dried flowers and a few curiosities.

The tools of craftswoman Alexandra Bachand are lined up on shelves with an old-fashioned charm, in the form of hundreds of small amber vials, each containing their own olfactory baggage. Everything is pretty, but you have to see beyond the eyes to capture a completely different aesthetic, because it is in the volatile that the richness of the place is concentrated, that which tickles with a at the same time the nostrils and the brain to unleash the imagination.

And if this is how, by closing our eyelids to capture the invisible, we discover the beauty of a garden? As a perfumer and olfactory artist, this is the approach that Alexandra Bachand spontaneously chose. On a plot of land on the edge of its century-old barn opens a garden of a thousand perfumes, a few visitors of which pass through the iron gate each year. Others can now do it differently by turning the pages of his first work, which is one of the rare books devoted to olfactory botany.

The artist presents the flowers and fragrant plants that she likes, and suggests aromatic arrangements to make in the garden. Grouped into 10 themes, these flowery islands take you on a journey from a garden that welcomes butterflies to others with scents of undergrowth or the Mediterranean. Added to this are projects and recipes to extend the pleasure beyond the season. But one of the greatest charms of the work is discovering the secrets of an olfactory artist who here opens wide her complex universe, with generosity and poetry.

Let the scents speak

Smell, underlines Alexandra Bachand, is a powerful time travel machine. A jewel box of evanescent stories. Hers is rooted in the family hotel where she grew up, in limitless nature. Built at the end of the 19th century^e century in a Tudor style, the old college still sheltered the smells of chalk and mysterious potions impregnated in a laboratory. “The scents coming from the kitchens, the beeswax from the wooden furniture, the floral or musky notes emanating from the coat closet… it was a kaleidoscope of smells to which was added the scent of the fields and gardens. All this fed my imagination. It was only later that I realized that not everyone discovers their world with their nose! »

It is therefore no coincidence that she wanted to anchor her haute perfumery workshop in the landscapes of the Eastern Townships, a home found after her studies in perfumery in Europe. His grandparents and their parents before them beautified the region’s landscape by gardening. And it is there, around an old restored barn, that Alexandra Bachand created her own flowery dream. There as well as during the summer, she stores olfactory memories which will later take shape on scented sticks, in a symbiosis inseparable from her creation.

The artist takes us to the back of his studio to let us feel his most recent creation, Jasmine at dawn, an eloquent way of illustrating his words. “I worked with a very ripe pear, but you feel a little green at the beginning. I wanted to capture the enigmatic aspect of jasmine which wakes up under a sunrise and which pierces through the mists of the lake, which is not the same as the animal smell of the plant at the end of the evening. »

Give yourself time

By choice, Alexandra Bachand adopts the approach of slow art and artisan know-how, embracing all stages of creation: from ideation to manufacturing, with our noses in the mud and our hands in the earth. His haute perfumery is inseparable from this rhythm which allows him to tell authentic and embodied stories, and to feel the emotion. “It must remain small, art must remain on a human scale. »

“Listening” to your nose takes your time, she says. The sense of smell does not tolerate any competition with other senses. The same goes for creating a perfume, the process of which can take more than a year.

Alexandra Bachand lives to the rhythm of her passion, she dreams of perfumes and flowers at night. With infinite patience, the artist creates, develops, refines, until finding the aromatic mesh which unfolds without roughness. It all starts with a few poetic verses thrown on paper, which the perfumer then translates into the language of smells. One molecule at a time. Hoping not to upset the fragile balance of the composition which can collapse like a house of cards after months of work.

The same humility applies to the garden which she describes as a book on learning about life. “Gardening teaches us wisdom. You cannot rush a flowering or a plant that you want to see grow. You have to let go. » Scent gardens is its irresistible invitation to sow fragrant sparks this spring and to take the time to discover nature fully.

Visit Alexandra Bachand’s website

Scent gardens, aromatic projects and perfumery secrets

Alexandra Bachand

Les Éditions de l’Homme

217 pages

Who is Alexandra Bachand?

Trained in fine arts, Alexandra Bachand a detour through visual design before pinpointing his vocation at age 30. Having become a perfumer after obtaining a diploma in Europe, she laid down canvases and brushes to create with smells. Her talent is expressed at La Grange du Perfumer, the perfume house that she opened to the public in 2014. The place is surrounded by a fragrant oasis – Le Jardin de scenteurs – which occasionally welcomes visitors. Between 2017 and 2020, his exhibition Flowers of arms, on the First World War, was presented in museums in France and Canada. Dream in Parishis very first perfume, and three others, including Sfumato or the invisible aura of Mona Lisaare archived at the Osmothèque de Versailles.