A fascinating project by the textile and colour designer Margrethe Odgaard to explore links between our senses … so how taste or flavour, and presumably also smell, can form associations with certain colours.

In blind tastings of different foods in four different groups - Apricot, pomegranate and date in one trial and masala and marshmallows in another - people picked a colour from 520 different colour samples on the ice-lolly sticks and then put them into the slot in a wooden box to record which colours they associated with which flavours.

Colours selected for each specific group of flavours are shown in frames.

Obviously the mental and emotional process - linking a colour with a flavour or smell - is complex and surely has to be subjective. Some flavours will seem hot or cool or strong or subtle - we use many of the same words when we try to describe flavours and colours - and presumably that makes the choice of specific colours relatively straightforward but also people will also associate a specific smell or flavour with a particular memory of a specific event so that could well be the colour of the room they were in when they first tried a food or there might be a strong link between a person they knew and their favourite food and their favourite colour.

This experiment also, of course, throws a light on how designers, particularly product designers, have to consider options for colours that have to reflect fashion while allowing not only for personal taste but also conventions within a community or society for which colours are associated with a function … so designers have to consider colours that a wider community might associate with freshness or grief or passion or, that most curious of human concerns, about which colours reflect or might signal that you have good or bad taste.

Biennalen for Kunsthåndværk & Design

margretheodgaard.com