Ashka Not Perfumes 2018

When I was not wearing perfume, ashes perhaps, I found myself haunted by three dark charcoal drawings, obscure, indistinct, smeared and full of shadows. I could no longer avert my gaze and everything else disappeared.
At first I saw forest, clouds and wind, storm, fire and damp cold, reddish, bright as cubeb pepper, whirling wildly through whipping rain, smelled soot and dark furrows of flint in the charred wounds of the trees, split by twitching lightning, their branches plunged into black wet earth under the rumbling thunder.
The second drawing showed grim figures, shadows in the shadows of their hoods, crouching in a circle on the green foliage of a clearing in the same forest. They breathed citric, spicy smoke of burning olibanum, which burned the tar from the tobacco leaf, a dark column of smoke from their midst.
On the third finally, black water plunged from a cliff at the edge of the forest. Here I found myself dressed in leather, sitting on coffin wood and ethereal needles, staring motionlessly to the other side of the gorge, the wind carrying the scent of burnt wood and the dark mist of the silent waterfall, the thousand grey aromas of ashes that the rain had washed out of the charred trees and burnt soil and which now descended downhill in cold cascades.
Only after several endless hours of smoking did the close-up images disappear from the leaves, to a port in the subconscious, where Ashka drawings have always fitted in.