Placebo was designed to explore the influence of imagery on olfactory perception. In a small, informal experiment, the same perfume was presented to participants as two different scents, each paired with its own visual cues. People were then asked to describe what they smelled. Although the perfume was identical in both cases, responses varied widely.

Issue two of Nose Magazine is centred around the proposition that smell, more than our senses, is shaped by suggestion. Scent resists precision. It reaches the brain as something partial – ambiguous, fleeting, often difficult to name. Our language for smell is limited, and its closeness to memory and emotion makes it especially porous. What we think we smell is often guided by the imprint of what we have smelled before, what we have been told to expect, and how our other senses are engaged alongside it. These pages explore this instability, seeing it as a ground for meaning, where priming becomes a source of richness.

We often conceptualise museums as facilities of preservation. However, this preservation tends to be associated with the objects behind the displays rather than the facility itself. In regular life, the objects and environments we interact with change in tandem with our bodies. When I return to a place after an extended hiatus, both the environment and my body have been weathered, amended, and aged by time. What was disorienting in this instance was that this museum seemed to exist as an almost perfect time capsule of itself, separated from the temporal nature of the rest of the world. Table Manners was a play on the phenomenon, whereby plastic or ‘fake’ food was, to me, emblematic of this perceptual framework. Like a memory, they’re inherently ‘other’, understood as artificial preservations of something organic and all too perishable. Our dealings with these stand-ins are familiar, uncanny, distant, and finally illusory. Form is preserved; touch, taste and smell are absent, supplied only by prior association.

Court Fool is a photographic story that explores the shifting roles we inhabit in daily life through the language of performance. Set within a stylised, theatrical world, the series examines the paradox of self-presentation. Are we expressing who we truly are, or merely performing the roles we’ve internalised? Court Fool questions whether any essential truth can be uncovered in our expressions of self, or whether all expression is, inevitably, a kind of mask.