Highland Park’s “Between You and I” Journeys from Egypt to Scotland with Laila Gohar

Artist Laila Gohar came to the world of whiskey with a multidisciplinary, multi-sensory perception of art that informed her evocative interpretation of Highland Park’s freshly released 17-year-old single malt. The latest in the Orkney brand’s “Between You and I” series, the resulting whiskey has notes of orange blossom, warm spices, and leather. Gohar created two bespoke packaging styles with illustrations by Silja Goetz that make surreal references to Egypt-born Gohar’s interpretations.

Translating between olofactory, visual, and tactile elements was a natural fit for her, since she often uses food in her artwork as a visual and social material. “I don’t really isolate the senses. And even if a work is visual or olfactory or whatever, to me, it’s how to create an experience that feels all-encompassing and that affects all your senses, some in a very direct way,” she explained, continuing, “I take all of the different, all of the five senses into consideration.” It was, she found, not so different from how she develops an installation or a tablescape.

The New York-based Gohar thought of memories and places, not traditional tasting notes, when Highland Park’s master distiller Marc Watson first sent her a sample. Her immediate reaction was to recall memories, experiences, and places such as the slopes of a volcano and a courtyard in Andalucia. Her Egyptian childhood especially came into play. While the orange blossom took her to the that sunny courtyard in southern Spain, that fruit tree flower is a key element in Middle Eastern decorative atmospherics. “You smell it in courtyards and in certain areas. They usually plant it like at entrances of gardens and things like that. It’s a very welcoming and sort of hospitable smell.” She enjoys picking the scent up in perfume, food, and pretty much anywhere.

Silja Goetz’s illustrations stem from Gohar’s vignettes. The motifs on the light packaging for “Between You and I” include a pointed archway, an egg on a column, fruit, flowers, and a nose flamed in an oval mirror. The dark packaging on the travel-exclusive “Between You and I: Journeys” has hand-drawn illustrations of a long-lashed eye, lips, and a crescent moon. That version is New York-inspired, with chocolate notes. The dark/light day/night contrast is no coincidence. When comparing the two whiskies, “One felt more like daytime and everything that is associated with daytime, like brightness, sun, warmth. And then the other one felt to me more evocative of nighttime, which is more mysterious and smoky and hidden, maybe like something that needs to be discovered. So that’s exactly why we went with those two different directions.”

The drawings were a dual conversation, and Gohar welcomed Goetz’s reinterpretations within the creative process, telling Galerie, “I asked her to sort of reimagine them in her style. It wasn’t prescriptive, but more of describing like a mood or a feeling and then asking her to illustrate that.” When it came time to rearrange them, no particular object or image or detail was especially difficult to preserve. The challenge for Gohar was to combine them compositionally on the real-life packaging. “It’s kind of like a collage…She produced a set of illustrations that I was thrilled with, it was more laying them out in a way that made sense and told a cohesive story, because you are applying them to a three-dimensional object. It’s not like a comic or a newspaper or something flat.”

Gohar, who says that a first visit to Scotland is on her agenda, enjoyed whiskey prior to the project, but working with Highland Park has opened another world that makes her want to let everyone know that whiskey is for everybody. Her vision for the perfect way to share “Between You and I” differs visually from the old-school masculine imagery of clubby leather armchairs and cigar-scented air. “I would invite close friends and family and be in a garden or in a courtyard somewhere kind of in the late afternoon,” she said, going on to note that she likes her whiskey neat.