“Smell it, but don’t stick your nose straight in it,” says Michael O’Shaughnessy, pulling a small white card, sealed twice in ziplock bags, out of a metal chest. “Waft it, close your eyes. Does it remind you of anything?”
O’Shaughnessy, an illustrator and senior lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, first began using smells with art students, asking them “to develop projects and concepts” based on scents “because it’s a leveller”.
“You’ve got kids who are bright and they can run with design, illustration projects,” he added. “But this project in particular, I noticed that the clever kids didn’t always respond more effectively than the kids who may be mixed ability.”
He was running a similar workshop for the public at Tate Liverpool when he was approached by a prison education provider, who asked if he would fancy trying to run one in jail. “I was fascinated,” he said. “I really wanted to do it.”
Now, his prison workshops, named Perfume Stories, have been so successful that he has trained in-house staff to deliver the workshops. O’Shaughnessy sources the scents himself and volunteers his time to teach.
Participants are given small white cards, which have been doused in perfume. They are asked to smell them and use that scent as a springboard to create prose, a poem or – if they are less comfortable with writing – a drawing.
“The thing about smell is that you don’t have to be clever to have that memory; that’s your memory,” O’Shaughnessy said – those who may not have excelled in school may have a more developed sense of smell than others who did.
O’Shaughnessy chooses the fragrances he works with carefully; he wants to invoke positive memories, and take prisoners back to happier times. “I avoid certain very heavily masculine smells, in case any of them have had bad male experiences,” he said.
At the end of the session, he asks the students to write a single observation on a sticky note. “Opening brand new toy soldiers on Christmas Day. Good times as a kid. 53 years ago,” one inmate wrote.
Others recalled holidays, smelling the roses on walks in the park with a dog or spending their pocket money on trips to the sweet shop. Some say the workshop brought back memories of parents, children or former partners.
“This smell reminded me of being at my nan’s as a young kid, messing around with all the creams, perfumes and hair oil on her chest of drawers,” another wrote. “This memory takes me back to the ages of seven, eight, nine, and 10, and is a memory I’ve never actually thought of before.”
Perfume Stories is mainly used in English lessons, but at HMP Holme House in Stockton-On-Tees, O’Shaughnessy’s project has been used across the curriculum, in hospitality, business studies and barbering.
In hospitality, food scents were used to help learners to recall specific dishes from their childhoods, with them then drawing up a bistro menu inspired by their memories. These included dishes named after their inspiration, such as “Nana Betty’s hotpot”.
In business studies, learners considered how scents can be used in marketing, and to drive purchasing.
“Learners gain a great deal of skills from it, from debating skills, to writing skills, to analysis skills,” an education manager at the prison said. “It has been a great project used at Holme House, and the learners always engage well in it.”
As he sought to expand his work, O’Shaughnessy approached some of the biggest fragrance houses across the globe, hoping to find collaborators for his project. While initially he had little success, he found help closer to home, from Carvansons, a bespoke perfume creator in Haslingden, Lancashire.
“Basically we were the only ones that responded,” said Vicki Last, the company’s marketing manager. “He sent out his advertising portfolio and some of the work he’d been working on, and said: would you be interested in just even talking about it?”
Carvansons has produced several bespoke fragrances for O’Shaughnessy, which he has used in his workshops. One of the many smells in his silver chest, requested by a member of staff at a prison in the north-east, was “tomatoes ripening in a greenhouse”. Another scent, that he bought from a company in Los Angeles, was “box-fresh trainers”.
When asked what prison smells like, O’Shaughnessy responded enthusiastically: “I’ve got the smell of prison!”
He added: “I think it’s like a room which has had no air, and it’s had roast beef made in it, left for weeks, and it’s got that musty old food smell, no air smell.
“It’s got like an animalistic thing at the heart. “It’s a combination of old sweat, beef, and it’s very distinctive, but it’s not nice.”