The business of salt-winning

Salt-winning: the deliberate production of salt from seawater.

Everything in the exhibition will involve salt. I mainly use salt scraped off of New York City's streets and sidewalks. They over-salt there for liability reasons. Some salt has a pinkish hue, other salt is grey, greenish or blueish. But it all dissolves the same and comes up bright white when I salt-win. I used to run the dirty salt water through a funnel and a coffee filter until I realized that when salt water wicks up an object, it leaves its dirt behind.

You can salt-win by evaporating salty water. Easy. But there is also an art to it. To make salt gardens, which is sort of what I am doing, you can add ammonia (to make the water evaporate faster) and liquid bluing (to break down some of the chemicals in basic salts so they colour a bit-- liquid bluing is old-fashioned "bleach" btw). If you are interested in the recipe, or want to know exactly how much faster salt water evaporates when a fan is used, Wayne Schmidt is an expert, A-type personality that grows beautiful crystals of all kinds.

I make a little evaporating pool for each object I'm letting the salt wick onto. Sometimes similar projects share one plate:




The problem with this set-up is that I am constantly fussing with the little pools, moving them closer or farther to the oscillating heater, switching them out as some finish and others take their place. When you move the pools, the crystals get disturbed and they don't turn out perfectly square. Also, how close or how far from the heat (how fast the water evaporates) affects the crystals.

A perfect, undisturbed crystal will look like the cubes in this blog's header. But I can tell that whomever made them took them out of the water instead of letting the water totally evaporate-- see the tiny white ball-like bits on them? Those are another type of crystal that only grow via wicking or drying out. So the cube crystals still had a wee bit of saltwater in them after the cube formed.

There is one more type of crystal that happens when the water evaporates very quickly and the salt concentration is very high:


See at the bottom how the salt sort of fans out with long shards and a sort of flat plate between them? That's from the salt accumulating at the top of the water and forming a crust. Then the rest of the salty water sits underneath that crust with a space for air. The container needs to be smallish because these will only form when there is an edge to attach to.

A little-known salt fact: when you mix salt and elmer's glue, you have two or three seconds before the salt sucks out all the water and you're left with glue-rubber. I reckon that if you're ever trapped in a bomb-shelter with only glue and salt, you should mix them together to get pure-ish water. The final water-less rubber looks like this:

This image also has a bit of whitener in it, since the salt stays dirty.

One last thing: salt wicks up. If I put a piece of foam, charcoal brick, chunk of felt, or other solid but permeable object in the salt water, the salt will always start forming on the top, then move to the sides, but will never form on the bottom or middle if the object is thick enough. So if you are afraid of a slow-moving salt attack, hide under your mattress.