INTRA VENUS

Eau de Parfum

Intra Venus came about after a year’s worth of intimate study into the late Jewish-American artist Hannah Wilke’s artwork, within which her own body and being was always her immediate artistic subject as well as, quite often, her medium. And her final body of work called the Intra Venus series—which includes self-portraiture, sketches, paintings, sculpture, and video, and which document her body’s physical transformation from the time she was diagnosed with lymphoma until her death. Carter Weeks Maddox's Intra Venus is his translation of one of Wilke’s self-portraits from the Intra Venus series.

In the portrait, Wilke’s head and chest are wrapped in a knit hospital blanket, rendered in the perfume as a hyacinth accord structured around faint, medicinal yarrow. The image was taken as Wilke underwent a battery of intravenous chemotherapy treatments, represented in the perfume by piercing wasabi and punchy mastic, toward the very end of her fight against lymphoma, which also makes an appearance in the perfume as a poison bulb accord. Like cancer, the poison bulb — a variety of amaryllis also known as the swamp lily in the Deep South—is lethal. It grows within damp, marshy habitats, which I’ve represented using cedarmoss, mate, and cyclamen. And like cancer, we can smell the bulb long before its presence poses a real threat to our lives due to the presence of a mercaptan, a class of molecule that we also add to natural gas so it will not kill us either, contained in the flower’s natural scent.

And though the portrait depicts Wilke during brutally painful days, the gentle manner in which she closes her eyes, cocks her head to the side and smiles ever so slightly transforms her into a Madonna; she seems to have achieved transcendence. So at the perfume’s base, in a callback to notes also found in Buen Camino, cooling cypress and hinoki simulate her radiant affective state.

Composition:

• Cyclamen, Cypress, Yarrow, Wasabi
• Hyacinth, Amaryllis, Sulfur, Maté
• Hinoki, Mastic, Tree Moss

Perfumer: Carter Weeks Maddox, 2021

inci list: Alcohol denat., fragrance (parfum), may contain any of the following: amyl cinnamal, amyl cinnamyl alcohol, anise alcohol, benzyl alcohol, benzyl benzoate, benzyl cinnamate, benzyl salicylate, cinnamal, cinnamyl alcohol, citral, citronellol, coumarin, eugenol, farnesol, geraniol, hexyl cinnamate, hydroxycitronellal, isoeugenol, limonene, linalool, hydroxyisohexyl 3-cyclohexene carboxaldehyde, methyl-2 octynoate, alpha-isomethyl ionone, evernia prunastri (oakmoss) extract, evernia furfuracea (treemoss) extract