Adult Workshop: Art of Enfleurage

Instructor: Jenn Wilson Shepherd

Ages: 18+

Learn the art of enfleurage: Enfleurage is a perfume-making technique in which raw materials are immersed in a fatty substance to capture and preserve their scents. This workshop will get you started with the process. Enfleurage takes time and patience. To build up a full scent takes about 15-30 days.

Jenn Wilson Shepherd takes inspiration from John Berger’s pivotal essay, “Why Look at Animals” and the tens of millenia tradition of depicting animals. She takes a posthumanist lens of our cultural history of animals that seeks to move beyond liberal humanist conceptualizations that continually privilege the human and divide humans and animals based on capacities for reason and language. Wilson Shepherd collects images of camera traps from wildlife refuges-essential tools for scientists to track elusive and reclusive creatures. Behind the camera there is no person, just the machine that is triggered by the animals’ movement. Essentially, the animal activates the image and becomes the unbeknownst author and the observed. She also looks at our invisible connections to our perceptions of fauna and extinction of wildlife with explorations in sound, memory, and smell to move beyond the invisible divide that we create with other living creatures.