Bloomsday Festival 2026
11-16 June 2026
Join us at the James Joyce Centre for a special Bloomsday Festival exhibition Perfumances.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is a novel famously rich in texture – linguistic, emotional, and sensory. To celebrate Bloomsday, the Irish Embassy in Paris invited Irish perfumer Meabh McCurtin, who works for the renowned International Flavours and Fragrances in Paris, to create an interactive perfume experience exploring Ulysses through our sense of smell. This exhibiton invites you to follow your nose through Joyce’s Dublin.
These six original scentscapes or “perfumances”, as Joyce might have called them, interpret the themes of Ulysses, translating prose into perfume, to open a fresh sensory gateway into Joyce’s masterpiece. From the narcotic hush of Lotus Eaters to the reverent swirls of church incense, these olfactory compositions summon the novel’s city – its streets, chemists, bedrooms and blooming gardens. Each draws on Joyce’s own language and imagery, rendering the invisible currents of the book – its musks, its violets, its sulphurs – into something you can breathe and carry with you.
What does a forgotten letter smell like? Or an afternoon at Sweny’s pharmacy? Or the ghost of a lover in the folds of old linen? In Ulysses, smell is a trigger for memory, lust, grief, and sudden joy. These perfumes are not simply decorative. They are interpretive tools, offering a way to navigate the novel’s atmosphere and emotional depth. Ulysses is a book to be read with the whole body. An experience to be savoured. With this project, we invite you to linger and languish in it a little differently, to move between its rooms and pages and trace Dublin through the traces it leaves behind.
The exhibition will be available throughout the Bloomsday Festival at the James Joyce Centre. For more information, please read the booklet below.
The Bloomsday Festival is organised by the James Joyce Centre and supported by Fáilte Ireland and the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport.
