Salt of the Earth

Posted: 21 Jan 2012  |  By: Joseph Brennan

For those partial to superstition, the spilling of salt at a table is an omen of bad fortune — think of Judas Iscariot in da Vinci’s The Last Supper — that can only be remedied by a pinch of it tossed with the right hand over the left shoulder into the face of the devil waiting there. The works of recent exhibition Still Life: The Food Bowl — made entirely of salt pumped out of the ground of the Murray-Darling Basin — too, were omens of misfortune current and to come.

In 2009, Ken Yonetani sought to raise awareness of issues regarding the sugar industry and the Great Barrier Reef with his sugar installation Sweet Barrier Reef, shown at the Venice Biennale. This year, teaming up with his wife Julia, the pair took part in a Synapse art-science residency that saw them on location at Mildura for three months with scientists from the Murray-Darling Freshwater Research Centre and SunRISE 21. The results were sculptural salt works shown at Sydney’s Artereal Gallery in June that aimed to educate audiences of the environmental devastation faced by the region.

Known as Australia’s ‘food bowl’, up to ninety per cent of the country’s fresh food is produced along the Murray-Darling Basin. Yet, degradation due to rising groundwater and irrigation drainage has meant that 550,000 tonnes of salt is pumped out of the basin each year in an attempt to curtail severe salinity. “I wanted to use the beauty of the salt and also its spirituality to depict the death of the landscape through the idea of the food bowl,” Ken said in an interview with the exhibition’s curator, Cash Brown.

“The land is so salty,” he told Brown, “and we were amazed that we all consume the produce from this region and yet most of us are pretty unaware of the impact this has.” Not lost on the pair was the historical significance of salt and salinity as a metaphor for the fall of civilisations (such as with ancient Mesopotamia).
The installation consisted of a salt table laden with produce from the Murray-Darling Basin — including a cast of a dead Murray cod; a chandelier — of 5000 individually hand-cast, hand-finished, drilled and threaded grapes; rococo pillars topped with urns and bowls and plates overflowing with fruit; and empty picture frames that allude to Rubens and Brueghel’s The Five Senses of painted plenty.

There’s an old English saying that every grain of salt spilled represents a future tear, and it’s this idea — of the potential devastation that will result from the degradation of our food sources — that makes this work haunting, its food sculptures of salt similar to the plaster casts of the people of Pompeii.

Still Life: The Food Bowl travelled to Mildura in September and is currently (until 22 November) at GV Art, London. The pair’s next project will involve uranium as a statement on the effects of nuclear fallout in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that followed Japan’s March earthquake and tsunami.
Ken and Julia Yonetani are represented by Jan Manton Art, Brisbane and Artereal Gallery, Sydney.

Images from top:

Ken + Julia Yonetani, Still Life: The Food Bowl, 2011, Murray River salt, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists and Artereal Gallery. Photograph by Julia Yonetani.

Ken + Julia Yonetani, Pillar with Fruit Bowl, (detail) 2011, Murray River salt, 74.5 x 33cm diameter. Courtesy the artists and Artereal Gallery. Photograph by Julia Yonetani.

Click here for further information on Jan Manton Art .