Return to the Sea - Saltworks

Japanese Artist Motoi Yamamoto visits Salt Lake City to create a temporary salt installation in the Meldrum Science Center at Westminster College. At the conclusion of the installation viewing period the saltworks will be swept up and the salt returned to Great Salt Lake at Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.  

Yamamoto’s installation works resemble raging seas, byzantine labyrinths, geography of a flattened brain or staircases to the heavens, but if you zoom in you will find they are nothing more than a remarkably common commodity, table salt.

Yamamoto’s saltworks are similar to the style of Tibetan Sand Mandalas, an expansive floor display of colored sand that is ceremoniously destroyed after completion to demonstrate the transitory nature of non-metaphysical life. 

These dramatic and expansive works are painstakingly piped by hand, enjoyed briefly and then swept away. Like life, Yamamoto’s works are more wondrous because of their impermanence.

To learn more about Tamamoto's saltworks, please see http://vimeo.com/52553020.