ILLUME X Meenal Patel Candle Collection
I’m often combining different senses in a lot of the things that I make and how people interact with them – for children’s books it’s a combination of visuals and text and sometimes the sound of someone reading to you, for textiles it’s a combination of the visual and tactile. So this collaboration felt exciting because it’s an opportunity to try a form of storytelling that includes a sensory element that’s new to me in relation to the art I make – combining the sense of smell and visual art to connect to a memory or place.
I had so much fun working with the lovely ILLUME team to connect memories of hiking in foggy cloud forests and soaking up ocean air with the feeling of making this art.
The collection features three fresh fragrances rooted in the natural world and inspired by my time living in California: Talking Trees, Forest Flora, and Rainy Walk. I got to collaborate with Illume's fragrance director, Greta Pagel, to bring some of my favorite nature memories to life and pair them with paintings from my Bloom Upon Bloom series.
Making these paintings is one of my favorite ways to play with color and often they inform color choices in my other art and illustrations. Looking at all these colors while I paint slowly does something good for my brain. There is a meditative element to it from the tactile quality of the paper, the feeling of playing, the repetition of pattern, and the slowness of the painting. All of those things feel similar to how being in nature and paying attention to what’s around me does. The feeling of making these paintings seemed like a fun jumping off point for thinking about fragrances that could play with the art.
I loved working with Greta to think about how memory and art can inspire fragrance. And thinking about fragrance as an art medium in its own right. I wanted to evoke a sense of calm with little bursts of delight. Those are the things that I feel when I’m making these paintings, which are parallel to the feeling of being in the outdoor places that inspired the fragrances.
I hope you like it! You can purchase the collection through the ILLUME website.