With Trimerous, it feels like Euan McCall at Jorum Studio is doing something genuinely new with orris. It doesn’t have a classical structure, with or without a modern twist. It’s nothing like the lipstick and violets of Iris Poudre, the bright-eyed elegance of 28 La Pausa, or the chilled crypts of Iris Silver Mist. Rather than the cold white flashes of polished silver, Trimerous’s orris has the soft sheen of old pewter, the warmth and smoothness of graphite rubbed on tracing paper.

My first thought, wearing Trimerous, was of the mysterious landscapes of Man Ray’s photograph Dust Breeding on the surface of Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors. It’s the way that both revel in texture and detail, the accumulation of softness over more structured layers, and use transformations that keep true to the material, but change the context and perspective so you see the original with new clarity.

But Trimerous also feels more like clothing, something that belongs to both the artist and the body. Rather than controlling his fabric with severe tailoring, though, it feels like McCall is working more like Madame Grès: listening to the material, letting it drape, fall, and fold around the body with its own weight and nap, or going further with those materials, like Rei Kawakubo to move away from the body to find entirely new shapes. Or maybe Ma Ke’s Wuyong work shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale, with complex layers of couture hand-stitching, but in hand-spun, hand-dyed fabrics laid out in low light on aromatic raw earth, impossible not to want to reach for them, caress them, wear them.

Because this is something that you want to wear, feel how it flows around you, catches the light and shifts on your skin, from the fizzy, gauze moments that raise a shiver, to the enveloping sueded softness. I don’t often wear a single perfume three days in a row, particularly when I am itching to explore the rest of Jorum’s work, yet I keep reaching for this.

originally posted 30 May 2019.