return...

Wendy Stefansson. Return (detail). Salt crystals on kite strings, 2005.

Return was a temporary outdoor installation I made at my mother’s beach on Prince Edward Island. The family cottage there was built by my grandparents in 1950, and was a favourite retreat of my grandmother’s, my mother’s, mine, and now my daughter’s. At the time that I made this, the first of several salt works, I was beginning to deal with recurrent bouts of depression. I boiled up salt water solutions over a hot stove each morning and then left it to coalesce onto strings as it cooled, creating sparkling strands of cube-shaped crystals. Each day, I tied the new lengths of string onto the existing ones, slowly creating a curtain of salt. Before we left P.E.I. to return to our home, I hung the “curtain” of tears on the rocks at the beach, and photographed it as the tide came in and took away the salt, taking back its own.

In my work, salt references tears, as well as sweat and blood and body chemistry – all the messiness and effort of a life lived. It speaks of healing in the return of the salt to its source, the sea. Of cleansing and absolution. Of grace.

Wendy Stefansson. Return. Salt crystals on kite string, 2005.

Wendy Stefansson. Return (detail). Salt crystals and kite string, 2004.

Wendy Stefansson. Return. Salt crystals on kite strings, 2005.

For more on my salt works, see my post entitled "on tying the knot" -- http://inno-particular-order.blogspot.ca/2013/04/on-tying-knot.html.

on tying the knot

Wendy Stefansson. Back Story. Salt, string, vintage wedding dress. 2007.

Back Story is one of a series of works in which I have used salt as a medium. My process involved days of boiling up salt solutions in huge black canning pots, and letting it crystallize onto short strings. The strings were then tied together into long strands, and sewn to the waist of a wedding dress like a train. The quiet, repetitive action of tying the knots that linked these fragments together into a larger whole was at once meditative and metaphorical, speaking of the nature of marriage – not just “tying the knot” once, but continuing to tie it on a daily basis, over and over, remaking that connection against all the odds. That connection that is at once as fragile and ephemeral as salt and string; and yet strong enough to join two lives.

Wendy Stefansson. Back Story (detail).

To see my earlier salt works, see my post entitled "return" -- http://inno-particular-order.blogspot.ca/2014/01/return.html.

For more thoughts on the nature of marriage, see this post.

"futile, yet necessary"

Motoi Yamamoto. Forest of Beyond. Salt installation. 2011-12
Photo from http://www.motoi.biz/english/e_top/e_top.html.

Artist Motoi Yamamoto began using salt as an art medium in response to his sister's death. In his native Japan, salt is associated with funerals, with healing from grief, with washing sorrows away.

He has described his labour-intensive but ephemeral art as "futile, yet necessary."*

Isn't it all?


* from a video by the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, on the topic of a salt installation by Motoi Yamamoto. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eLIJuQSOJis.

if these tears to boats of salt would turn...

Motoi Yamamoto. Fountain of Remembrance (after raining).
Salt installation. 2000
Photos from http://www.motoi.biz/english/e_top/e_top.html

If I could mould these

tears to boats of salt, would they

float my grief away?

2012-12-29