The Scale of Silence, 2022
pigment inkjet print on archival cotton rag

84.1cm H x 59.4cm W [edition of 10 + AP] | $1380 unframed

Salt challenges our understanding of time, slowing and accelerating natural processes through its ability to both preserve and corrode. At its essence salt is a truth-teller. When salt preserves it has the ability to fix objects in their original, indisputable three-dimensional form. 2000 year old bodies preserved in salt discovered in north-Western Iran, still had skin, hair, organs and even clothes intact. As Professor Thomas Stöllner, archaeologist at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, states, “It’s as if they’d died yesterday."

However salt is equally an agent of change and transformation, it corrodes away the rhetoric until only the absolute remains. The photographs in this exhibition were given back to the places they were taken, inviting the salt from the site to make marks on the frame. The salt has a mysterious ability to communicate a resonance of the site's material history. The same way ocean water will consistently make marks of celestial bodies, the salt from Kati Thanda formed a scaly crust, reminiscent of a dead Lake Eyre Dragon I found frozen in time on the lake.

The artist acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the lands and waters which on (and with) she creates her work. 5% of profits from the sale of this work is contributed back to Arabana Country via Indigenous Desert Alliance.