Worth Your Salt (2020)
Digital video and digitized Super 8mm film, Duration 18 minutes
Contemporary dancer: Ryan O Neill
Stone carver and Sculptor: Séamus Dunbar
Fiddle player: Susan Hughes
La descente No.1 (2020), Giclee print on archival paper, framed, Dimensions 17” x21” (Edition of 3)
Worth Your Salt (2020), Giclee print on archival paper, framed, Dimensions 17'' x 21'' (Edition of 3)
It's titled comes from a phrase used when describing someone of value or someone who is a good worker. The film comprises of digital and analogue moving image with segments of stop motion animations centred around the material of rock salt which I've collected from a working salt mine in Northern Ireland. Using a combination of digital and Super 8mm film footage I have collaborated with a contemporary dancer, fiddle player and stone carver. The film is a visual essay exploring industry, craft, gestural movements and language associated with the material of salt. The structure of the film looks at a sense of time, geologically and a sense of time within the frames of moving image, while drawing attention to the value of labour, mass produced objects and natural resources.
These two photographs belong to a series of digital prints, La descente No.1 (2020), documents the result of growing salt crystals on mass produced objects associated with my film work Worth Your Salt (2020). The object in question is a 35mm found slide of an underground cave with the title 'La descente' written on it. This photograph presents one side of the object. In the photograph Worth Your Salt (2020), the image documents the result of stone carver Séamus Dunbar scribing into a piece of rock salt taken from 1500 metres underground from a working salt mine in Northern Ireland.
Editions acquired by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland
Documentation by Trevor Wilson>>>>
The MAC Belfast at BA and MFA Graduate exhibition
