Meg Webster’s Art Takes New Form

When the seminal land artist Meg Webster was invited to create a perfume with Comme des Garçons and the Dia Art Foundation, she was excited to bring her organic sculptures to an even more ephemeral form. “It was a chance to experience something new,” says the 82-year-old artist and environmentalist. It’s an intoxicating prompt: how might sculpture and other artistic offerings translate to fragrance?

To understand the collaboration, titled [ ] Dia x Meg Webster, it’s worth knowing that scent has long been a component of Webster’s work. Since the early eighties, Webster has used sand, grass, beeswax, salt, and other natural materials to stage large-scale installations that bring the outside indoors. Her sculptures are living, breathing entities. Some need water and regular care; others disintegrate, brown, and otherwise fade away with time. If you visit Dia Beacon by April 13, you can see several of these works in conversation with pieces from other minimalists of her generation like Richard Serra and Donald Judd (who gave Webster her first show.) In one room, an eight-foot curved wall of beeswax envelops the viewer, standing in gentle opposition to Serra’s steel barrier just feet away. Cono di Sale (Cone of Salt), a six-foot cone of salt shaped like the nose of a nuclear weapon, sits next to Robert Ryman’s white paintings in another.

“We had worked with Comme des Garçons previously and had been waiting for the right moment to collaborate again. When they approached us about developing a fragrance, it coincided with the opening of Meg Webster’s exhibition at Dia Beacon,” explains Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Foundation and the curator behind the Bourse de Commerce’s recent Minimal show, which featured Webster’s sculptures. “Her work has long engaged the natural world not only visually, but sensorially, through materials like beeswax, earth, and moss, so scent is already fundamental to how audiences encounter it. It felt like a very organic extension of her practice to translate that experience into fragrance.”

The collaboration began with Webster speaking with late Comme des Garçons Parfums creative director Christian Astuguevieille. “I work with primary geometric forms made of natural materials like soil, hay, branches, beeswax, water, and moss. We attempted to create a fragrance that incorporated the elements of the work but not necessarily direct references,” says Webster. “I am interested in the sanctity of nature.”

Two years of back and forth with perfumer Emilie Coppermann led to the earthy, layered scent. Notes of geranium and frankincense sit on top of a mushroom accord that feels plucked from the dirt; Madagascar patchouli and sandalwood envelop the green organic scents. It’s a beautiful ode to Webster’s lush living works.

“Meg approached it much as she does her installations, thinking through elemental associations, spatial experience, and the relationship between the body and the environment,” says Morgan. Webster says she hopes wearers “experience its subtle sense of fresh yet complex nature. Like a walk in the woods or after a spring rain. I care that they adore and care for nature and experience all its beauty, complexity, and primary importance.”

The fragrance is Comme des Garçons Parfums’s second collaboration with an art institution, following 2017’s project with the Serpentine Galleries. Webster also designed the bottle and packaging for the perfume using recurring language from her sculptural practice. The brackets and the fragrance hold and live in the artist’s creative vision. “This project allows that sensory dimension to extend beyond the gallery, prompting a more intimate and portable encounter,” explains Morgan.

It’s an inspiring collaboration—to be expected from the conceptually-driven Comme des Garçons Parfums. Imagine how an artist like Sissel Tolaas or Anicka Yi might design a fragrance. Or how, say, a Catherine Opie perfume would smell. For now, one can see Webster’s work and take home a piece of her vision.

[ ] Dia x Meg Webster is available now.