Salt Gatherer

In addition to the exhibition Sense of Place that I have at the Alice Gallery, one of my pieces was accepted in the Utah Statewide Annual exhibition. Salt Gatherer celebrates the beautiful range of pink salt that can be found on the shores of Great Salt Lake. The buttons were created by my jewelry artist friend Mary Lambert out of salt and silver. We gathered the salt crystals together last April and Mary made the most beautiful buttons out of them. The opening for the Statewide Annual is this Friday evening at the Rio Gallery.

Mary also created some cocktail rings out of salt that she made to photograph with the mitts out at the lake. She entered those in the Statewide Annual and they were accepted too! They beautiful and fragile rings that complement my piece so well.

Salt deposits along the shores of Great Salt Lake have been harvested for culinary purposes for millennia. Father Escalante’s journal of 1776 described how Native American Indians used the salt deposits. Mountain man Jedediah Smith harvested Great Salt Lake salt and even John Fremont and Kit Carson commented on how easy it was to pick up salt off the lakeshore. Today salt harvesting is big business but an individual can still find beautiful salt crystals ranging from pink to white waiting to be harvested along the salty shores.