Salt House of the Earth
Project description: A free-standing sculptural installation made with a large cardboard box, sewing pins, fur, eggshells, two giant demijohns, and manzanita branches.
I built a stepped gable house from a vertical wardrobe moving box and placed it on a four-foot-tall wooden pedestal. The house stands at the center of a circle of manzanita branches.
I pushed white-headed pins into the outside of the seven-foot-tall house and fixed the fur of a used coat with red-headed pins to the interior. Nested into the fur were the rounded sides of chicken egg shells. I lit the interior room from below to rouse a dark, capricious, and sensual ambiance.
The back of the house opens at eye level, and there is a horizontal shutter covered with vertical pins daring people to look inside, thereby passing the obstacles to explore the soft interior.
I inserted two plastic tubes into the bottom of the cardboard house. I attached each tube to a demiJohn filled with bubbling water and colored crystals.
I am a conceptual artist and use everyday materials. The theme of this project is Salt of the Earth. I approached it from my Dutch roots. Areas of Holland are lined with quaint salt houses that hide the pump equipment that mines salt from subsurface salt layers hundreds of meters thick.
I further studied the chemical composition of salt. Sodium chloride, commonly known as table salt, is an ionic compound of one part sodium, Na, and one part chloride ions, CL, held together through a chemical bond. Sodium chloride, NaCl, is essential for all living things and, in addition, is a flavor enhancer for food. However, consuming NA or CL as separate elements has mortal consequences. The bubbling demijohns of fluid represent the delicate balance between safe and dangerous salt solution concentrations flowing through the house.
The Salt House of the Earth needs to be understood against the background of my concerns for the bewildered state of the human condition; Aspects of attachment, anxiety, and imagination.
The combination of the sharp exterior to the dark lining of the interior and the flow of the dangerous salt concentrations into the house are images of anxious attachment.
This anxiety is similar when a literal home is unsafe, where love is unpredictable, or desired intimacy goes erratic.
