Like lingering petrichor or damp earth, Meg Webster’s sculptures envelop the senses—hardly surprising, as they emerge from “soil, sand, and salt,” in the words of the DIA Art Foundation, a longtime guardian of her work. For years, visitors have been invited to step around and into the shadow of her earthworks, installed as mounds and pillars along the gallery floor.
Starting March 19, those encounters will be bottled and available year-round, thanks to a collaboration between Webster, DIA, and Comme des Garçons, which has produced the artist’s first signature perfume. According to a sample sent to the ARTnews office, the scent is gender-neutral, woodsy, and slow-suffusing—with a late spark of musk, like a fallen branch underfoot, cracking the stillness. The fragrance is housed in a polished silver tetrahedral (a triangular pyramid) box, a form familiar from Webster’s visual vocabulary.
“I make sculptural works with natural materials, formed into primary geometric shapes meant to be directly perceived by the body. The making should be visible,” Webster told ARTnews. “The perfume we created with DIA strives to be a primary fragrance—like the air after a spring rain or a walk in the deep forest.”
Polished Tetrahedron for Sometimes Containing Water
Collectors of the Japanese fashion label Comme des Garçons, founded by Rei Kawakubo in 1969, know it for striking, geometric constructions—sometimes composed of boldly clashing fragments, each piece apparently paused in motion. In recent years, the label has forayed into arts and culture, previously crafting perfumes in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries and Tracey Emin (“fresh, light, yet deceivingly complex”); the lifestyle publication Monocle; and the renowned composer Max Richter, whose scent evoked, among more, graphite, piano soundboard, cedar, and violin.
To mark its collaboration with Webster, Comme des Garçons has installed a work by the artist at their West 22nd Street store in Manhattan, across from DIA’s Chelsea branch. Aptly titled Copper Containing Salt II (2017), the piece features a single sheet of copper curled into a cylinder and filled to the brim with coarse rock salt. The two seemingly disparate materials make a sleek, symbiotic form: The salt relies on the copper for shape, while the copper acquires a tender purpose in cradling the salt. Another salt cylinder by Webster is on view at DIA Beacon, uniting the two spaces through explorations of void, volume, and elemental materials.
Paula Cooper, Webster’s representative, told ARTnews that “Copper Containing Salt II is an exemplary sculpture from Webster’s celebrated body of work, which is founded on shaping natural materials into simple geometric forms.”
