Moira Salt

multimedia artist, using film and sound, performance, found objects, printmaking, and installations.
practice looks at Black diasporas, particularly women, and their connection to memory, myth, and land. uses geology, fiction and technology to imagine possible futures and their necessary histories, which cast a critical eye on capitalism and environmental consumption. mining archives, and interweaving different ecological objects and materials tries to imagine what may have been forgotten and where we (as a global community) might be going.
recent artworks have been exploring Black trauma and healing, using sonic storytelling, collaborative performance, and geology.

and our bodies knew
how to move just fine
David Dale Gallery (Open Studios), 2023

Developmental work exploring an Afro-futurist science fiction story set in a future dystopia where a group of women follow a deep vibration into the ground and find salvation. Conceived as a work of intuitive practice on this theme, where the artworks could be potential props or backdrops for a performance.

Needs and Freedoms
16 Nicholson Street Gallery, 2022

Curated by Aga Paulina Młyńczak, this exhibition originated from our shared core interest in a tweak of human nature which created and still perpetuates structural racism, and which will also survive it. Through different artistic approaches, McGurk and Salt take a look at the present and cast themselves into the future. Salt uses personal voices and imagination as means for recovery, while McGurk uses archives and studies bureaucratic frameworks as a way of getting closer to the universal human flaws at the root of the problem.

The works were developed in tandem with ‘Reparative Trespassing’ – a publication edited and introduced by Isabella Shields. Therein we collected elements of urban planning, community stories, personal narratives, poetic geology, hidden ciphers and data visualisations in order to build fragments of future archives and host past spectres.

Link to their website
Link to publication

where the restless ocean pounds
Commissioned by Sustrans, 2021

supported by Transport Scotland

A sculptural installation and set of performances on diasporic experience, hauntings of Slavery, and the Black female body. Throughout the month, a series of polyphonic spoken word performances will use ritual in order to retrieve and re-embody memory; giving space for the ghosts (past, present and future) to speak.