Land loss is happening right under our noses: Here’s how an artist preserves scents from disappearing coastal communities
French artist Manon Bellet collects water from a swamp while working on her olfactory project, “Golden Waste,” during her residency at A Studio in the Woods. Photo by Sabree Hill
By Ava Borskey
BATON ROUGE, LA — Most of Manon Bellet’s artistic work deals with time, ephemerality and disappearance.
“Our confrontation of human beings seeing something that we can never catch, metaphorically our lives, but obviously the world around us and the world we live in,” Bellet said. “My work always picked up the fragility of the human being and the place we’re in.”
But it wasn’t until the French visual artist moved to New Orleans in 2016 that her work began addressing environmental issues, like climate change.
“Living in Louisiana…basically faced me directly on the vis...