Five Senses (2011)
materials: Murray River Salt
dimenions: 92cm x 123cm x 6cm
From ancient Mesopotamia over four thousand years ago to present-day Australia, salinity has posed a major problem for civilisations throughout history. Along the Murray-Darling basin, known as Australia’s ‘food bowl’ as it produces up to 90 per cent of Australia’s fresh food, 550 000 tonnes of salt is pumped out of the ground every year to try and stem the increasing rise of highly saline groundwater.
The Five Senses, featuring five frames all made from salt, is directly inspired by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens’s famous series of the same name. In place of their lavish depictions of a vast variety of agricultural produce and foodstuff, however, is left only an empty frame, and the contents of our imagination.