Bet / Salt Room
- Viola Bordon
- Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
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Student Arts Innovation Grant
Salt is a wild mineral. It accumulates and disperses, making land barren, salinating water sources, and eroding and preserving life. Viola Bordon, an MFA candidate in the Weitzman School of Design, has been working with minerals, water, time, and the way these phenomena are bound together, over the course of the last year. Pictured are sculptures made from hanging fabric in basins of saline water, constructed in Bordon’s studio. Salt creep, which occurs when water evaporates, takes hold of the fabric and offers it a stiffened organic form.
Viola Bordon will install a temporary site-specific artwork in Utah’s seasonally flooded Bonneville Salt Flats, over the course of three weeks in the spring of 2021. The project will examine the entangled relationship between building, dwelling, and environmental cycles, through the ritualized construction, inhabitation, and deconstruction of a tent made of salt in the middle of the flooded flats. Bordon will collaborate on this project with Charlie Hart, a performance artist and sculptor. They will conclude the two-week process by taking the tent down and returning the salt to the flats by rinsing the fabric in the floodwater. This project is an extension of explorations Bordon has been conducting in her studio with basins of salt water and draped fabric forms. They will document this process with high-resolution photographs and, upon returning to Philadelphia, will present these photographs along with artifacts from the piece.
The Project title (Bet) comes from an early hieroglyphic form of the letter B and has been translated to mean house or room. It was chosen because it encapsulates the primary need for covering, evolution of culture, and a porous boundary.