‘Akerman Daly – Artist in Residence 2017/18 & associated commissions’
During 2017/8 Milly Thompson produced new works for the AD website, sent directly to AD’s mailing list.
Three commissions including downloadable pdf’s, mobile ready artwork, limited edition sarong, and an origami finger fortune-teller comprised inter-related content continuing Thompson’s research around older women and marketing.
The whole project is a mood board towards new science around pheromoneal changes, skin PH, HRT and the properties and uses of various herbs such as shatavari (an ancient Hindu herb, dubbed ‘queen with a thousand kings’), and developments in nanotechnology for the fragrance industry. It lays foundations towards the development of a new perfume that might remedy commonly held feelings of invisibility amongst menopausal and older women. This new body of artwork acts as a platform from which the interrelation of female aging and wellbeing in contemporary society can be considered in relation to psychology and the marketing industry.
There is currently a lot of interest in the potential for fragrance to do something other than cover the body with a ‘fake’ smell. A new trend is for perfumes smelling of… nothing. However these scents are still not designed for older women and are not tested on them either. Thompson considers how marketing might engage older women with the fragrance market in a positive way.
By way of an announcement of Thompson's residency Akerman Daly used 'I Choose Painting', 2016. It is a piece of art text in the form of a poster-print. It looks at the use of paint and new media as tools of expression for women, and of the accentuation on female artists to use new media to express feminist/anti feminist concerns. ‘I Choose Painting’ attempts to ‘claim’ painting for women as a ‘gendered tool’. Of course, the work itself is a digital one and is thus innately and intentionally hypocritical.