The first British woman to qualify as a classically trained "nose," Lyn Harris has spent three decades building a career translating the invisible into the sensory. The founder of the fragrance house Perfumer H, Harris recently launched Clay, a perfume inspired by a wood kiln visit in Jingdezhen, China's porcelain capital of 1,700 years. The scent layers juniper, birch tar, musk, burnt ash and minerals with charred cedar, sandalwood, orange flower and mandarin - an attempt, she says, to bottle the earth itself.

Harris's path to the art world ran through Sotheby's. In 2022 the auction house invited her to create three scented candles around an important sale of 17th-century Dutch Old Master still lifes and landscapes. Rather than literal interpretations, she teased out alternative readings: Abraham Govaerts's river landscape became Smoke in Woods, drawn from a distant flickering fire, while Osias Beert the Elder's fading bouquet of roses and insects became Rose and Insects, built on honey, immortelle, papyrus and vetiver. It was, Sotheby's UK chairman Alex Bell said, the first time the house had used scent to interpret an exhibition.

The commissions keep coming from adjacent worlds: a bespoke citrus fragrance for the newly opened St Clement Hotel in London, whose foyer hangs works by Richard Prince and Mark Grotjahn, and Soap, a new scent for designer Nick Wakeman's fashion brand Studio Nicholson. Her glass bottles are hand-blown in a London studio, her packaging designed by the same studio that works with Artangel.

Harris traces her craft to a Yorkshire childhood and her grandparents' smallholding in the Scottish Highlands, and to training with renowned Paris perfumer Monique Schlienger, followed by time at Robertet in Grasse. In a field historically dominated by men, she deliberately sought a woman mentor: "Monique taught me not to be scared of my emotions when being creative."