Big Salt

I live on a floating home in Seattle, on fresh water, and this work is about the sea past the locks.

I forage what I can from the ocean — dehydrated seaweed flakes — and source the rest of what’s already in it: salt, sodium alginate, magnesium. They go down dry onto sensitized paper. Then I flood the sheet with water that’s been steeping seaweed until it runs gel-thick, lay glass over the top, and put it in the sun.

Big Salt looks at the water from as many angles as it will give me. From below, standing on the ocean floor looking up. From above, across a salt marsh. From inside it, suspended in a kelp bed. I set the conditions. The water decides which one it becomes.