Moira Salt

multimedia artist, using film and sound, performance, found objects, printmaking, and installations.
practice looks at B/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.
tries to imagine what may have been forgotten and where we (as a global community) might be going.

wisdoms of ash (studies)
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.

flowing through volcanic transformation (or the water that held all)
EVOLVE, RIG Arts, 2023
Culture Collective

Created with community participants in Seedhill, Paisely, as part of On-Belonging, a series of workshops for B/black and brown women and mothers on identity, migration, and expression.

The film follows four women’s stories as they interact with the filmmakers collected objects, and film eachother’s journey to the white cart river waterfall (or the Hamills) where they perform a small personal ritual.

Exploring research around the specific geological conditions of the river that enabled its use as a power source for Paisley’s industry.

the dirt eaters
16 Nicholson Street, 2022

The Dirt Eaters title refers to those who used to consume specific types of earth and clay for vitamins.

In the film two women are immersed in an intimate conversation. One of them recalls living on a toxic land, while on screen a disembodied figure is looking for her bearings in an unreal landscape.

Created for the exhibition Needs and Freedoms, at 16 Nicholson Street Gallery, Glasgow, 2022, with support from Creative Scotland.

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

sustain: a posture
16 Nicholson Street Gallery, 2022

featuring Joanna Bémont and Phoenix Archer

Two Black womxn take up various postures from upright, to leaning, and prone on the ground. Moira retells statistical likliehoods for black women in the United States (where she and her mother are from) like a guided meditation, or a game.

They relay the biases and disparities within data and systems of care for brown women.

Created for the exhibition Needs and Freedoms, at 16 Nicholson Street Gallery, Glasgow, 2022, with support from Creative Scotland.

where the restless ocean pounds
Bowling Harbour, 2021
Commissioned by Sustrans

with support from Transport Scotland

Performances:
dreams of salt (and other ghosts) (I, II, and III)

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