Bella La Spina in 2024

Salt
23.08. - 14.09.2024

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Sea salt is a harbinger of memory. It has a familiar taste, smell and feeling on the skin. It has the power to simultaneously erode and to preserve – characteristics that embody the notion of an archive.

Salt blends the historic photographic archive of the NSW coastline with the natural archive embedded within the landscape itself. Litres of seawater scavenged from the coast were boiled down into salt, which was then used to create salt prints on silk – a delicate and transient fabric. The artist’s deep connection to the ocean, forged from a childhood spent by the shore, infuses the work with a sense of familiarity. The lighthouse stands on a cliff as a testament of civilisation, a guide to the ocean dwellers at night, but contrastingly of colonisation, isolation and neglect.

The act of stapling, much like the snap of a photograph, is a violent imposition—forcing something into existence that wasn’t there before, imposing a contrived narrative onto reality. As rust takes hold, it becomes a rebellion against the act of archiving; as erosion sets in, so does the rejection of a forced narrative. Despite the precision and reliability of the salt printing process, repeated attempts to print certain images reveal a resistance—an acknowledgement that some images from the archive do not wish to be exposed. The archive, then, becomes a keeper of ghosts, preserving not just what is visible, but also what remains hidden.