Föenander Galleries Director Elle Föenander has been featured by ECC as part of its series exploring scent, creativity and the people shaping New Zealand’s creative landscape.
Titled Elle & Tuileries, the feature offers a personal insight into Elle’s world as a gallerist, creative and collector, exploring the relationship between fragrance, memory, art and the spaces we inhabit.
ECC describes Elle as “equal parts creative and curator”, highlighting the distinctive point of view she has developed through Föenander Galleries on Faraday Street in Parnell. Since establishing the gallery in 2018, Elle has built a programme that brings together emerging and established artists, with a focus on considered and individual approaches to contemporary art.
Föenander Galleries represents a diverse array of artists whose practices reflect the breadth of the gallery’s programme. For Elle, however, the gallery is only one part of a broader creative life. ECC’s feature also touches on some of the early experiences that shaped her relationship with art - from drawing a portrait of her father at three years old, to receiving a set of watercolours at five, and later encountering a Yayoi Kusama installation at fifteen.
These early experiences eventually led Elle towards the art world professionally. By the age of 30, she had left a career in property to establish the gallery she had been working towards, beginning a new chapter that would develop into Föenander Galleries.
A central theme of the ECC feature is Elle’s approach to collecting. Rather than following trends or attempting to justify every decision intellectually, she advocates for responding instinctively to the work itself - buying what you connect with, even when you cannot immediately articulate why.
This philosophy reflects the broader approach that informs Föenander Galleries: an emphasis on conviction, curiosity and a willingness to engage with art on an individual level.
The scent of home
Alongside her work in the arts, Elle discusses her relationship with fragrance and its connection to memory.
For Elle, the sense of smell is particularly powerful in its ability to evoke emotion and transport us through time. Having relocated several times throughout her life, she describes home not as one particular place, but through a collection of familiar scents and memories.
Her associations with home include her mother’s cooking, her husband’s cologne, her sister’s baking, the scent of her cat and the jasmine that flowers during summer.
It is this ability of scent to capture both the visceral and the intangible that particularly interests her.
“ I love the paradox of scent in how it captures life at its most visceral and most mythical,” Elle explains in the feature.
Scent also forms part of her daily rituals. Lighting the fire has become a regular transition between day and night, with the smell of burning timber acting as a psychological cue to step away from the day’s mental to-do list.
Tuileries by Trudon
ECC’s feature forms part of a series exploring the fragrances that creatives and designers return to, with Elle sharing her connection to Tuileries by Trudon.
Her attraction to the scent is rooted in its symbolism. For Elle, the Jardin des Tuileries represents a meeting point between history, architecture, horticulture and art - a combination that resonates strongly with her own creative world.
The garden is also home to the Musée de l’Orangerie and Claude Monet’s celebrated Water Lilies, bringing together many of the elements that inform her interests as a gallerist: art, place, history, beauty and the experience of moving through a considered environment.
The connection makes Tuileries a fitting choice for Elle - a fragrance linked not simply to a particular scent, but to an entire cultural landscape and its layers of history and artistic meaning.
Through Elle & Tuileries, ECC offers a glimpse into the person behind Föenander Galleries, exploring the experiences, instincts and sensory details that have shaped Elle’s approach to art and creative life.
The feature highlights a philosophy that extends beyond the gallery walls: that art, design, fragrance, memory and the spaces we inhabit are all capable of shaping how we experience the world.
Read the full feature, Elle & Tuileries, on ECC by clicking here.
Photography and video by Katie Begbie.