After discussing with Maiko and Oscar, I realized that my project lacked the connectivity between personal emotions and public sentiment. Indeed, salt for me personally, it can be another way of tears to express the 'unhappy' in my heart, but this does not mean that other poeple also think that salt can represent tears. Everyone has a different understanding of "salt". For example, Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto, which I researched before, was influenced by the Japanese funeral culture. He believed that salt could represent his love for his deceased sister. Through the previous year's study, I may have become more aware of the salt material, but still, lack some research which is for the public's point of view. Since I have been thinking about my own relationship with materials (salt and my own traumatic experience), I am currently unable to move forward. This is where I need to reflect and summarize.
The original intention of this project is to help others to "speak" and "heal" their traumatic experiences. Because the traumatic experience is a personal event, and the trauma experienced by each person is different, I originally hoped to introduce my own traumatic experience, to connect with other people's traumatic experiences.
In my conversation with Shuang, I realized that the process of salt crystallization is a process of time-lapse, such as the salt crystal formed by the saltwater beside the salt lake, or the process of leaving salt crystals on the face after the tears evaporate. Moreover, Sigalit Landau took a video, a pair of shoes filled with salt crystals were placed on the ice. After day and night, the salt crystal shoes slowly melted the thick ice. They all showed salt as the evidence of time-lapse. Therefore, wearing my works or influenced by my work can help people to feel that although I am experiencing a very sad thing, as time goes by, everything will be better, so they can get some kind of spiritual encouragement and psychological comfort from time-lapse. From the individual as an entry point, salt as a medium, through time to express the healing process of the wound, in order to achieve a healing effect.
Also, I think that "Rub salt in the wound" can be the connection point between salt and the public's emotions. The idea comes from the pain that I feel when the wound on my finger touches the salt when I do the salt experiment. "Rub salt in the wound" is an alternative form of the idiom in our daily life. This idiom has been used since the mid-1800s, which represent two different uses of salts. The first aspect involves the use of salt, which is the application of salt on the whip, which is used as a mode of punishment. The second method is not terrible. It refers to the use of salt as a preservative for medical reasons. This practice can be traced back to ancient Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Sailors sprinkled salty water on their wounds. They believed that salt could prevent infection and dry the wound, but the use of salt can cause a strong tingling sensation.
Moreover, this idiom can be understood as creating something that is already painful, unpleasant, or even worse. It does not refer to self-induced pain; it refers to as often caused pain by another. Deliberately or due to circumstances beyond the control of one person. For example, when someone makes a second injury on something you have already experienced, you will say to him: "Don't rub salt on my wounds." Interestingly, when I told this idea to my classmates, I was pleasantly surprised to find that even though a classmate never had the experience of rubbing the salt on the wound, he still felt pain when I mentioned the term “salt on the wound.”
In addition to the relationship between tears and salt, I can continue to explore in the next study about these two directions.
Next step: 1. I will conduct a salt crystallization experiment, observe and record its growth process.
2. Research and thinking about which form can be expressed as "rub salt on the wound".
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