Zuza Mengham started with the scents themselves. She made a conscious decision not to read the descriptions, but to smell them all and see what she could decipher from them first directly, taking notes and ideas. After she matched them up with their descriptions she made a series of drawings with watercolour overlays, building up the colours and patterns until she was happy they translated in a way that felt appropriate. Because of the size of the pieces, a certain degree of planning was necessary as they are each around 7kg of liquid resin. Having said that, they served more as a guide to refer to. Sometimes she finds the volume or shape of one tone doesn’t work with another any more, and she has to use a degree of intuition with what feels right to balance it out again. If an area feels too intense it may need leveling out with a gentler saturation and level of detail, or vice versa.
