Still Life: The Food Bowl

Still Life: The Food Bowl' is made from this groundwater salt. It draws on still life as an artistic tradition that emerged as current agricultural practices were being developed, bringing new food produce to the tables of a rising European bourgeois class. The still life themes of consumption, luxury, vanity and mortality are reenacted, now entirely from salt. The stark white salt works bring us back to the environmental cost of agricultural production and link up with historical associations of salt — as a powerful, sacred substance that maintains life by enabling food preservation, but also induces the death of ecosystems and the collapse of empires. Salt becomes a metaphor for the rise and fall of civilisations throughout history, and the issues of environmental decline, climate change, and food security that face us on a global scale today.