Scent, Sound and Imagined Plant Life Transform the Anchorage Museum in Faux Flora

Icelandic family art collective Fischersund creates a botanical world shaped by scent, memory and human experience

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA — 

What if a flower could smell like childhood?

Visitors to the Anchorage Museum will step into an imagined botanical world this fall when Faux Flora, an immersive exhibition by Reykjavík-based art collective and perfumery Fischersund goes on view Oct. 9, 2026, through Sept. 12, 2027. Through scent, sound, sculpture, moving paintings and photography, the exhibition invents flowering species that have never existed in nature, but draw on familiar experiences of memory, landscape and human life.

Faux Flora comes to Anchorage following its world premiere at Seattle’s National Nordic Museum in 2024. The exhibition brings together the creative practices of Fischersund, founded by artist siblings Ingibjörg, Jónsi, Sigurrós, and Lilja Birgisdóttir. 

Faux Flora takes inspiration from Iceland’s nearly 500 native plant species and the relationship between scent and memory. In creating the exhibition, Fischersund looked to scents associated with different stages of human life, from mother’s milk and clean clothes reminiscent of infancy, grass-stained clothing and candy remembered from childhood to the absorption of light and blackened earth of death. “Scent is a universal language,” Lilja Birgisdóttir told The Stranger in an interview about the exhibition. “It’s a connector,” Jónsi added.

The artists translate these sensory memories into new, imagined plant species, whose fragrances and forms create a multisensory journey through the stages of plant life, from germination and growth to flowering, seed formation, and dispersal. The botanical stages parallel human experiences of birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and death.

Rather than cataloging plants found in nature, Fischersund creates its own botanical world. Imagined flowers and plant forms appear through sculpture, video and hand-painted photography. Fifteen original fragrances give the invented species another sensory identity, while abstract soundscapes accompany visitors as they move through the exhibition.

Scent is not an accompaniment to the art, but one of Fischersund’s primary artistic mediums. Perfume becomes another way to encounter each imagined plant and to explore the close relationship between smell and memory. Music and sound are equally integral to Fischersund’s practice, building an atmosphere around the visual and olfactory elements of the exhibition.

“Our understanding of place comes through all our senses. Scent and sound can locate us as powerfully as an image can. They are deeply connected to memory and to how we remember landscapes and seasons,” said Anchorage Museum Director Julie Decker. “Faux Flora’s imagined botanical world is both unfamiliar and recognizable. Fischersund’s work emerges from Iceland and from a distinctly northern experience of plants, light and sound, which makes bringing it to Alaska meaningful. The Arctic is a pivotal place for thinking about our relationship to the natural world, creativity and how knowledge of place is carried.”

AN EXHIBITION TO SEE, HEAR AND SMELL
Experienced sequentially, Faux Flora asks visitors to do more than look. Sight, scent and sound work together as the imagined plants emerge, grow, flower and disperse. The familiar life cycle of a plant becomes a way of considering human growth, memory, change and the passage of time.

Public programs throughout the exhibition’s nearly yearlong run will extend these ideas beyond the gallery, including creative-making events at Seed Lab, the Anchorage Museum’s community creative space; music and sound experiences in the museum’s Thomas Planetarium; and interdisciplinary talks at the museum and with community partners.

Faux Flora is organized by the National Nordic Museum, Seattle, in collaboration with the artists. National Nordic Museum Chief Curator Leslie Anne Anderson curated the exhibition.

About Fischersund
Established in 2017, Fischersund is a Reykjavík-based family art collective and niche perfumery founded by siblings Inga, Jónsi, Sigurrós and Lilja Birgisdóttir. Working across scent, music, visual art, performance, and installation, the collective uses sensory experience as storytelling, creating perfumes, scented concerts, visual artworks, and immersive environments that explore memory, landscape, and human experience.

Fischersund's approach grew from a small shop in Reykjavík into an interdisciplinary artistic practice in which fragrance functions not simply as a product but as an artistic medium alongside sound and image. Faux Flora marked the collective's first museum exhibition.

Learn more about Fischersund HERE.