Cover The Balvenie Malt Master Kelsey McKechnie and contemporary artist Daniel Arsham unite two disciplines shaped by craft, material and the passage of time
The Balvenie Malt Master Kelsey McKechnie and contemporary artist Daniel Arsham unite two disciplines shaped by craft, material and the passage of time
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On the eve of Frieze Seoul, Tatler Singapore travelled to Seongsu, Seoul, for the global unveiling of ‘The Dawn of Our Spirit’, an extraordinary meeting of whisky, art and time between The Balvenie, Malt Master Kelsey McKechnie and contemporary artist Daniel Arsham
September in Seoul means Frieze is in town, the galleries are humming, and Seongsu—the city’s once-industrial quarter now colonised by fashion, art and some very good coffee—is operating at full tilt. Tatler Singapore flew north for the occasion: the global unveiling of The Dawn of Our Spirit, a collaboration between The Balvenie Malt Master Kelsey McKechnie and contemporary artist Daniel Arsham that brings together whisky, art and the peculiar alchemy of time. The choice of Seoul was no accident. South Korea has developed a serious appetite for single malts, and The Balvenie has become something of a phenomenon in the country. Seongsu, for its part, has built its entire identity on taking things with history and making them speak to the present. The Balvenie, it turns out, understands that language rather well.
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Above At the heart of The Balvenie’s The Dawn of Our Spirit, McKechnie and Arsham explore what happens when whisky-making tradition enters into dialogue with contemporary art
At the heart of The Balvenie’s The Dawn of Our Spirit, McKechnie and Arsham explore what happens when whisky-making tradition enters into dialogue with contemporary art
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Founded by William Grant in Dufftown in 1892, the Speyside distillery remains devoted to its Five Rare Crafts, from barley and floor maltings to cooperage, copper stills and the intuitive hand of the malt master. It also helped pioneer modern cask finishing, demonstrating how transferring mature whisky into another cask could introduce further layers of flavour without relinquishing the character beneath.
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At the heart of its present chapter is Kelsey McKechnie, The Balvenie’s Malt Master and, by any measure, one of the house’s great jewels. Her craft carries an unusual humility: whisky-making is sometimes an act of creation without possession. “You might not get to try the whisky you make,” she said, speaking of spirit laid down for “30, 40, 50, 60 years”. You make it, essentially, for someone you may never meet.
Above The Balvenie Eighty-Eight-Year-Old was drawn from Cask 239, filled in 1931 and left to mature for an extraordinary 88 years before being bottled in 2019
The Balvenie Eighty-Eight-Year-Old was drawn from Cask 239, filled in 1931 and left to mature for an extraordinary 88 years before being bottled in 2019
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No whisky embodied that thought more profoundly than Cask 239. Filled on March 5, 1931, into a European oak sherry butt from Jerez, it remained at The Balvenie for 88 years before McKechnie deemed it ready in 2019. The result is The Balvenie Eighty-Eight-Year-Old, of which just 17 bottles exist.
Enter Daniel Arsham. The contemporary art icon has built a practice around “fictional archaeology”, turning familiar objects into imagined relics and collapsing our perception of past, present and future. For The Dawn of Our Spirit, whisky and art find their common denominator: time—and what human hands can persuade it to do.
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At the Seongsu pop-up, that idea became performance. Four dancers entered a circular pit filled with barley, initially so unassuming in its abundance. Moving in unison, they swept, raked and toiled through the grain, their repetitive physicality recalling generations of maltmen turning barley by hand. As patterns appeared, disappeared and were made anew, a single grain became a meditation on accumulation, labour and transformation. We watched in hushed reverence.
Above Eighty-eight years in the making: The Balvenie’s ultra-rare expression is a reminder that some acts of craftsmanship are begun by one generation and completed by another
Eighty-eight years in the making: The Balvenie’s ultra-rare expression is a reminder that some acts of craftsmanship are begun by one generation and completed by another
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There is poetry in remembering that whisky derives from the Gaelic uisge beatha: “water of life”. Here, Arsham makes the passage of time visible; McKechnie makes it drinkable.
And perhaps that is The Dawn of Our Spirit distilled to its essence: what we make in our lifetime need not belong solely to us.
Sometimes the greatest expression of craft is what we leave behind for the next generation.
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Adriel Chiun is the Branded Content Editor of Tatler Singapore.
