Bodies of Salt and the Domestic

Author, Dr Jane Fletcher

I remember my mother pouring boiling water into a small pudding bowl and adding a teaspoon of salt. When the solution had cooled sufficiently, she bathed my knee, carefully removing the grit with the saline solution. The ball of cottonwool turned pink.

She said it was sterile. It would help me heal. But it hurt like hell, and when my tears fell in outrage at the pain, I could taste the salt in them too.

“To rub salt in the wound” derives from the maritime practice of adding salt to an open sore (most likely inflicted through the lash). It describes a further insult or humiliation; the phrase acknowledging how pain was exacerbated to the level of torture through the application of salt. It is the perfect irony that the salt might also help the body mend, acting as an antiseptic and preventing infection.

Salt, then, is a composite of opposites, a contradiction and a paradox. It can enhance or ruin the taste of things. Salt water does not quench our thirst, and yet it is essential to the maintenance and functioning of our bodies. An ocean buoys us up, allows us to float. As Colin Wilson notes, paraphrasing Angela Carter, our nature is saline: we carry the sea within us. But there comes a point when the salt-to-water ratio is such that an organism cannot survive. Dead sea.

The items in Wilson’s deeply affecting large-format photographs, Bodies of Salt and the Domestic, trigger – of course – evocations of the kitchen (our own and those we’ve ingested from other places and sources). The culinary tools represent a body of knowledge: personal, universal, cultural, political.* The materials from which the objects are made are old-fashioned: fashioned from metal and glass and clay, instead of plastic or silicone. The jugs and jars, the biscuit cutter and colander, the spoons and bowls and baking trays are laid out in a forensic manner on a slab of stone that is not only suggestive of a surface meant for food preparation, but also of a morgue.

Each image is in a state of vertiginous balance, a barely managed equilibrium. Vessels are placed asymmetrically, often too close to the edge. A nudge might send them flying. And, even when the container is stable, the salt inside is precariously piled, ready to spill or be scattered like ashes by an exhalation of breath or the flutter of movement.

Salt is everywhere in these images: suspended in liquid; encrusted like a heavy frost on the surface of a dish; full-to-the-brim of a Pyrex jug (the excess having created a small pile of salt below the pouring lip); escaping beneath the fluted sides of the biscuit cutter; drifting into dunes against the split-wood of a woven basket.

The fairy-cake tins are heaped with salt that would make you choke and gag: the cup and saucer too. The promise of domesticity is suddenly nothing but a mirage. The salt may look like sugar, but it is as deadly as lime. Instead of providing sustenance and nourishment, these salt-filled objects speak of death; and we become the ship-wrecked sailor surrounded by water that is not fit to drink.

It is a curious thing that the photograph belongs so much to the scopic regime and yet triggers memories held and processed only by the other senses; emotions that may not be consciously defined or linked directly to what is seen, but instead redolent of the apparent randomness of individual and idiosyncratic association.

The photograph that commands my attention the most is that of the vintage madeleine mould: six seashells, two by three. The tin is lightly sprinkled with salt.** The scalloped moulds reiterate the connection with salt water and living organisms. But the lightly- dusted inverted shapes remind me of footprints in the sand, pawprints in the snow. The tonal range of the photograph resembles a winter landscape, where snow and ice turn the world monochrome. I think of those who have left – walked away or passed away - their loving presence and bodily warmth now just traces imprinted on our reveries and reflexes, and our daily actions: the colour all drained out. Drops of water have part- dissolved the salt to form lichen-like patterns across the metal cast. The watermarks on the wooden boards conjure stains made by sweat and body fluids on bedsheets: the marks darkening and intensifying as they encroach like the tide across the surface to form subtle, undulating boundaries.

It takes a massive leap of faith to believe in what you cannot see. To celebrate the enduring love of a life that is lost to us, and not succumb to the agonies of grief and despair brought about by physical absence. And, it is desperately difficult to express the desolation felt when someone you love dies.

Colin Wilson’s poised photographs of domestic objects engulfed in salt suspend pain and healing in a strange equilibrium. By creating spatial illusions that need to be negotiated by all the senses, they eschew attempts to explain how one feels and instead provide a place for silent contemplation and murmured conversation with the dead, brought about by the somatic sensations and associations they invite.

Endnotes

*I think of Martha Rosler’s seminal Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975); her parody of the

domestic space, her rage at the frustration of being a housewife.

**Salt is traditionally added to a madeleine mix: to balance the sweetness and

complement the lemon juice and zest. The warm, baked cakes however are dusted

with icing sugar.