Salt: Food Symbolism in Art, Alchemy and the Ritual
Exploring salt's meaning through the ritual, alchemy, healing, and everyday life
Tracing my cultural background and heritage, salt plays a significant role not only in my daily life through food and nutrition, but also through ritual, symbolism, and its alchemical references. When deciding to revisit my “symbolism” series, I realised that salt is probably the most symbolically charged and materially indispensable substance throughout history; hence, I wanted to honour it. Salt is both ordinary and extraordinary. It is an ingredient of survival and an emblem of purity. Salt occupies a liminal place, bridging the material and the metaphysical. It has numerous layers of religious, spiritual, nostalgic, and personal significance.
In antiquity, salt was regarded as a gift of both the earth and the sea whereas the Romans viewed it as a sacred substance, essential not only for preserving food but also for binding agreements; to “share salt” was to form a covenant of trust and loyalty. In Judaism, salt is used in covenant rituals and to sanctify bread, symbolising permanence and incorruptibility. In Christianity, salt serves as a metaphor for wisdom, fidelity, and the preservation of the soul, while in Islam, it appears in healing traditions and blessings, protecting against envy and misfortune. From an early age, I remember my grandma scattering salt near the windowsills to ward off “the evil” when guests were coming over.
In alchemy salt is one of the three great principles alongside sulfur and mercury, where mercury represented spirit and sulfur the soul or energy and salt stood for the body, matter, and fixity—the grounding principle that gives form and endurance. In healing practices however, salt has long been used as both medicine and protector. Across many cultures, saltwater baths or salt rubs have been prescribed to cleanse the body of disease or negative energies. Ancient Egyptians employed it in embalming, not only for preservation but also for its purifying connotations, ensuring safe passage into the afterlife. I have recently learned that in Japanese shinto rituals, salt is still used to purify spaces and mark the boundaries between sacred and profane. Salt can also act as a disinfectant but also cause a burning sensation. Its antimicrobial qualities were understood intuitively long before germ theory, making it a natural emblem of healing.
In essence, salt is a crystallization of human attempts to make sense of life’s paradoxes: the necessity of preservation against decay, the longing for incorruptibility amid impermanence, and the recognition that what sustains life can also carry the power to undo it. It remains a substance through which cultures articulate ideas of covenant, transformation, healing, and the fragile line between body and spirit. I think of all the artists who have worked with salt as a medium: Motoi Yamamoto, Deborah Jack, Anish Kapoor, Patricia Domínguez and Yoko Ono to name a few… The Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto creates large-scale installations composed entirely of salt, often forming labyrinthine or web-like patterns on floors, walls and ceilings. At the end of his exhibitions, participants to dismantle or disperse the salt, returning it to the sea as a collective gesture of ephemerality, memory and dissolution. Italian-born, New York-based Bettina Werner has worked since the 1980s with “salt painting” techniques and salt sculptures exploring texture, crystalline structure and colourised salt crystals in different forms. In his pigment-and-mineral installations, Anish Kapoor has used salt especially in early works exploring voids and geological materiality. Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez engages with botany, healing, and extractivism in her practice. In several installations she uses salt to reference lithium mining, Indigenous healing traditions, and the colonial politics of Andean mineral extraction. All of these examples are interconnected to my curatorial and anthropological interests which includes the themes of diaspora, body, ritual, healing, extraction, memory.
I will end this symbolism text with a short poem I drafted getting inspired by salt and its multiple qualities.
with salt I cleanse any negative energy,
with salt I cleanse judgment, shame and jealousy
with salt, I cleanse the pain away
with salt I ward off evil
with salt I bring in clarity, purity and protection
with salt I let go, I let go, I let go…
HK