Salted Earth

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The author makes a series of journeys, carrying out artistic practices uncovering histories, geographies, and biographies of salt and the places it has passed through. These practices explore both personal family history and the global entanglements of trade, labour, colonialism and migration narrated through a poetics of salt. 72 b&w 8 col. illus.

While histories of salt have long emphasized its central role in trade, power, and capitalism, is that the only way to understand this everyday substance? In Salted Earth, artist and researcher Katy Beinart offers a fresh perspective, exploring the poetics of salt. Through a series of journeys—to South Africa, Lithuania and Russia, Portugal, and Haiti—Beinart and her collaborators investigate the everyday rituals and cultural meanings of salt in diverse contexts. In her work, salt becomes a medium through which large-scale histories of migration, trade, empire, slavery, and colonialism—as well as deeply personal relationships, emotional geographies, memory, and intercultural connections—are symbolized and reimagined.

Drawing on fiction, poetry, and visual art, alongside family history, travel writing, trade archives, and artistic process, Beinart builds a rich, interdisciplinary portrait of salt as both a material and a cultural symbol. These journeys and embodied artistic practices open a sensorial and situated way of understanding material entanglements, where knowledge emerges through movement, encounter, and acts of making. Salted Earth offers valuable insights for students and researchers in art, creative writing, cultural history and geography, memory studies, and across the wider fields of aesthetics and the humanities.

Katy Beinart, based in Brighton, UK, is an artist, researcher, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, drawing, film, and performance.

This book combines art, history and cultural studies, by way of a series of journeys on which the author and others make artworks. Each of these journeys resulted from an investigation into the meaning of an everyday substance, salt, in very different places – South Africa, Lithuania and Russia, Portugal and Haiti. Katy Beinart explores cultural meanings and everyday rituals of salt in these four journeys that link migration, trade, empire, slavery and colonialism.

Histories of salt have showed how it has been central to trade, power and capitalism, but these histories don’t offer a way of understanding salt’s poetics. Drawing on fiction, poetry and art Beinart weaves together an argument that develops a material poetics of salt, understanding how salt artworks can symbolise relationships, mobilities, migrations, memory, and intercultural connections from the past and present.

The book begins with a search for family history, and combines family memoir, travel stories, trade histories, auto-ethnographic reflection and artistic process. The journeys, artistic practices and embodied engagements with place and people this book narrates are a way into a different understanding of material entanglements and relations through sensory experience which opens up other ways of knowing.