Salt Studies

Fig A – Salt from Egg Harbor, NJ gathered on 09/06/2021

In the fall of 2021 my partner and I woke up super early and drove to a small fishing village in New Jersey called Egg Harbor. We saw an eagle shit on a rooftop and later we untangled a horseshoe crab from something dead and released the crab back into the water. We filled several jugs with water. Afterwards, I boiled it for its salt. Since the start of the pandemic, through global warming and crisis after crisis, I have found myself lusting after things essential to life and wanting to work with timelines that are geologic.

The salt that came from that water was a little sandy and brown. Using the crock-pot in the studio it took several days and nights to turn the water into salt. It didn’t smell as much as I thought it might – I had imagined this thick sticky hot salty smell. With the temperature on high, I felt a pang of grief as it evaporated into the studio and became part of my space, and filled up my lungs. Global warming on a household scale, a rising temperature that I had inflicted, a thing that I maintained and I cared for. They say we have entered the 6th great extinction and on the Egg Island beach in the fall we found several tiny dead turtles. 

Fig B – Salt from Atlantic City, NJ gathered on 01/22/2022

My mom built a labyrinth in the backyard of our house when I was growing up. It was lined with sea shells that she had collected on a trip to the ocean. She walked the labyrinth every day. This was a spiritual place for her. You always leave a labyrinth different from how you entered. The sea shells connected my mom to the ocean, a portal to a place that was her home and a connection to her family both the living and the dead. 

The ocean makes me feel that I am far away from home. It is always a long drive, always a special occasion; I am always a tourist unsure about the mechanics of that place. In the desert, which was once the ocean floor, you can see for hundreds of miles, so I figured the ocean, a place defined by its vastness, was the same – but standing on the shore you can only see for three impossibly long miles. 

Near Atlantic City I try to imagine this ocean landscape without the color blue. I was alone and my phone died while trying to take a photograph of this little grove of dead Christmas trees gathered together and abandoned on the shore. I had promised my mom I would say hello to the ocean for her and figured I would call her and let her listen to it – a simulacrum for a conch shell. But with my phone dead, I just speak into the ocean, “Hello, my mom says hi and that she misses you very much.” The ocean drones back at me, uncaring about me and my mother, and moving to its own rhythm at scales unimaginably large to something my size. 

I got my boots all wet collecting the water. It was January, and so shockingly cold that I could only collect half of a jug. Still, it took days to boil down. When the water evaporated it was really bright white and produced a lot of salt. 

Fig. C – Salt from Cape May, NJ gathered on 06/04/2022

We traveled to the ocean to celebrate the beginning of summer. It was a perfect day at the beach. My friend had a moment with the ocean by getting his feet in the water and trying to take it all in, but drowning in the futility of this action, becoming a little more buried in the sand each time the waves met the shore.

I know there was a photograph that was taken of me that day, floating in the water lost in the buoyancy, adrift in that gentle bobbing. A little like being dead or being in the womb– to float like that so effortlessly. The ocean cleans and restores, a reminder of mortality, it is unpredictable and dangerous. You always leave a little different than how you entered. Salt cleans the water and offers sterilization and levity.  On the day we visited there were dolphins close to the shore. 

This batch made a stunning amount of salt from a small amount of water. 

Fig. D – Salt from St. Leonard, MD 06/26/2022

I traveled to the Maryland coast for a wedding. My friends exchanged vows of eternal consumption like the Ouroboros snake, and performed a blood sacrifice where they consumed a small amount of each other's blood from an oyster shell. All the witnesses shimmering like the sunset. After the vows there were stingrays that came out at dusk and feasted in the fading light. The water here remains shallow for a long while, and seems muddy. I didn't take much water and I didn’t get much salt. 

There are 3 to 4 salt shakers worth of salt in the human body, and without salt you would die. Salt is in the blood, blood is the ocean. Salt is critical for the electricity of the human body. It is a transmitter between cells, critical for maintaining a heartbeat. Love, an extension of this electric charge. 

Fig. E – Salt from Venice Beach, CA 11/23/2022

Salt from the Pacific Ocean when we went to visit my sister in California. Everyone ran around and I remember this big, all-consuming orange sunset. Later that night I quietly boiled the salt down at my sister's house.  

The history of salt parallels the history of labor. Soldiers paid in salt or human beings sold for their weight in salt. Nations became wealthy or poor from the salt trade. Now that salt is cheap and abundant, the elaborate hoax has become apparent – the fiction of money and all other possible futures.

Fig. F – Salt from Atlantic City, NJ 05/11/2023

It was a date. We got to the beach right at sundown, with just enough time before it set to sit by the water and eat our food together in the sand.

Salt makes ocean water undrinkable. Water, water all around, but nothing to drink. The IAEA claims that, by weight, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by the year 2050. Microplastics bio-accumulate within organisms throughout the food chain, and are found abundantly in table salt. This essential item that is needed for sustaining life has been completely entangled– the permeability of the human body and the reality of what it means to live and evolve in this always more plastic world.  

Fig. G – Various samples of verdigris made from the collected ocean salt

*Verdigris is slightly toxic please do not handle bottles 

Copper, a critical component for electrical connections, becomes a saturated blue-green color called verdigris when it comes into contact with salt. This color feels electric. Slightly poisonous and reminiscent of the cleanest tropical ocean on a clear day.  

Fig H – Salt Crystals 

*Please do not handle 

To dehydrate ocean water to make something dry. To take the water from the salt to turn the salt back into water. To add hot water to the salt and then to wait weeks until it is again dry. What is this Sisyphean cycle of making and unmaking salt? 

Fig I – Microscopic Salt 

*Take a look into the microscope

Some people think of salt as having magical healing properties. In rural Pennsylvania I stop to visit a salt room. The room is behind a crystal shop off the side of the highway, up a flight of stairs in the back of a house. The room is dark and full of salt and folding chairs. I am told that the salt is supposed to charge you as you lay in the room full of pink crystals. 

The microscopic arrangement of the salt molecule is a cube, which maintains its integrity as it shrinks in size. It is a microscopic landscape of endlessly repeating squares.