Salt Continued

I wanted to revist and confirm my thinking about this piece.

My main ideas surround the act of evaporation. For me evaporation is a metaphor for continuing existance. Salt can be diluted in water and then the water evaporated away. The salt always remains  and cannot be detroyed easily, but changes form each time.

• Water – vital for life / life spirit
• Salt – tears / preservation / history of use in death ritual
• Empty vessel – loss
• Black – mourning / bleak / infinity
• Single – Lonely
• Crystalize – take form
• Impression – no longer resembles the original

After the previous experiments and the knowlege that alum salt can mix with black food colouring, I took one of my knitted vessels and submerged it in a alum saturate solution with black food colouring. Within an hour crystals had started to develop. After some time my vessel no longer resembled the original and had turned hard, rigid and deep black with beautiful but ominous, glistening crystals.

I am really pleased with the outcome of this.

At the moment I envisage this placed here in the crypt…

Singularly alone and lit by one light. For me this encapsulates the feeling of loss

• lonely
• bleak / dark
• tearful

But also covers some of our ideas of what may happen to us in death.

• physics –  the atoms that we are made of cannot be created, changed or detroyed. They continue but in a different form.
• Evaporation – the soul leaving the body and rising.