Certain themes reoccur through Lena Trost’s practice; the invisible, the intangible and the immaterial. Glass is a suitable material to manifest the dematerialized. With its quality of transparency, it reveals what lies behind, next to or below, and often appears unseen. The materiality of the glass recedes in favor of what has been seen. Likewise smell is invisible, present and mostly ignored.
In her doctoral project “Embodiment of the volatile. The ability to notice that a substance is present. Or: how glass becomes odour“ Lena Trost claims that “glass smells”.
With this assertion, she demands a deeper understanding of the correlation between materials and their connotations. Lena Trost will appropriate the olfactory research for its artistic potential. Her conceptual claim to give a smell to the inorganic material glass and thus corporeality is intended to lead to an artistic position that makes it possible to perceive, and above all, to communicate about the intangible.