Mine is a family of lickers. As a child, my brother was given an ornamental salt rock like a clump of smooth-edged sugar cubes. Over time its edges became rounder and appeared smaller at one end. Eventually I had to admit that yes, I had occasionally snuck into his room for a sneaky lick. On a trip to the Wieliczka Salt Mine outside Kraków last summer, my eldest son soon realised he did not want to be in this dark, damp underground maze. Looking for comfort, he locked arms with my partner and distracted himself with regular licks of the vast, varied walls, unified by brackish flavour. He bought a salt rock magnet from the gift shop. It is stuck to our fridge now; I regularly watch him turn his head for a swift, instinctive lick as he leaves the kitchen.
Even the cat shows her devotion to salt, the scratchy-wet intimacy of a feline arm lick reminding me it’s time for a shower after exercise. This animal instinct is illustrative of human histories and relationships with domestication. It is said that it was the attraction of reindeers to the salt contained in human urine in arctic communities that first alerted people to the potential for animals to be domesticated, shifting the entirety of societal organisation (Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History, Vintage, London, 2002, pp.10-11). The ubiquity of salt around dinner tables in much of the world conceals the complexity and power of this potent and shape-shifting substance, this symbol and mineral of both life and death, liquid and solid, whose movement through and across oceans has shaped the planet and humanity.
Désirée Coral: Brine, Bodies and Movement
Written by May Rosenthal Sloan
A response to the material practice of artist Désirée Coral during their 2025 fellowship at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.
I cannot produce work if it is not related to the landscapes I inhabit.
The artist and scholar Désirée Coral centres her practice on place and material. She interrogates the history and culture of a location by looking at minerals, substances and ingredients found or more often transported there. ‘I cannot produce work if it is not related to the landscapes I inhabit’, says Désirée when we discuss this project together. Previously, she has examined gold in the United States, mined in and moved from Latin America; potatoes and tomatoes, transported from the Americas, ready to be claimed by (and transform) European cultures of consumption and identity. It makes sense that changeable, ethereal salt would come to dominate Désirée’s work in the glittering, grey city of Aberdeen, bisected by the rivers Dee and Don, their freshwater flowing into the brine of the North Sea.
When Désirée started her Freelands Studio Fellowship at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, she threw herself into historic shipping reports, seeking to understand the way that trade shaped the city. She initially thought of expanding her research into botanicals, following seeds and plants into the port of Aberdeen, but this changed when she came across references to the importation of salt during the sixteenth century (Victoria Clark, The Port of Aberdeen: A History of its Trade and Shipping from the 12th Century to the Present Day, D. Wylie & Son, Aberdeen, 1924, p.21.). Why, she speculated, would anybody invest the money, effort and time in the importation of salt into a port city surrounded by saltwater?
So ensued a long, embodied investigation to explore why salt might have been imported rather than simply produced here. Due to a particular cocktail of organisational, administrative and funding challenges in the university, Désirée had little studio time over the summer of 2025 and this compelled her into focusing on research in the field. She began an intensely physical practice of collecting sea water from the beach in St Andrews, getting to know the in-between coastal landscape, as well as her own physical abilities and limits. Her body instinctively worked out the sweet spot where the sand was just wet enough to comfortably hold human weight. She collected vast quantities of brine that would sit over months in a greenhouse, evaporating and forming crystals, whose complex structures would eventually be visible in jewel-like microscope imaging. Désirée talks of her partner, also an academic, questioning whether he could spend his research time assisting on this salty windswept coastline, as she posed the idea that this development of tacit knowledge and skill represented a form of research as valuable as that undertaken at a desk.
The question of value is one that permeates Désirée’s research. The fifth century Goth administrator Cassiodorus said, ‘It may well be that some seek not gold, but there lives not a man who does not need salt’ (Cassiodorus quoted in Reay Tannahill, Food in History, Paladin, St. Albans, 1975, p.184). Indeed, the value held in salt is central to life itself, and in her final exhibition as part of the fellowship Désirée juxtaposes gold and salt explicitly; forcing comparison by presenting the two materials side by side, as she explores the way trade has shaped the development of societies and cities. One exhibited object is a simple tin of the salt painstakingly collected during the project, far-removed from the throwaway paper sachets we are used to seeing (or not seeing) everywhere. This small tin refocuses our attention: it contains the immense personal value that exists in the form of the artist’s labour and that of the community she formed around the project.
Désirée describes the way salt forms – with seed crystals growing into ‘buildings or communities’ – which is comparable with her own practice. She started the salt collection and production process alone but was soon joined by her young son and partner, and then a raft of other volunteers. The interest and input of staff at the St Andrews Botanic Gardens followed, at the same time as the ceramics technicians at Gray’s School of Art encouraged and facilitated risky experimentations into salt firing, with a generosity and curiosity that she describes as rare in the academic institutions she has worked in. Désirée rejects the genius artist trope, insisting that creativity and research do not happen in a vacuum; just as the crystal themselves emerged during the process of evaporation, the salt in her small tins represents forming of creative communities through her artistic practice.
In so much of her work, movement is key: the temporal and geographical shift of a body or of a substance, and the impact that can have. This is interesting in relation to salt, which ebbs and flows in watery waves, solidifies underground, is mined or crystallised by human hands, moved purposefully or of its own volition.
There is a quiet, acutely observational power in the way that Désirée sees the world, and the movement of materials, money and culture within it, that I suspect comes in part from her own experience of cultural and geographical shifts, having moved from Ecuador to Italy as a child in the first of a series of moves across the globe. Her desire to make sense of how hierarchies of society and of knowledge operate led her to the universal subject of food, and the table itself, as a potently symbolic landscape that allows the interrogation of land, culture and history. Something about Désirée’s warm, perceptive character and slight sense of outsideness makes sense here. In so much of her work, movement is key: the temporal and geographical shift of a body or of a substance, and the impact that can have. This is interesting in relation to salt, which ebbs and flows in watery waves, solidifies underground, is mined or crystallised by human hands, moved purposefully or of its own volition. We need salt to live but too much will and often does poison us. As a substance it is full of change and contradiction, power and invisibility. On the palate and in the body, it requires fine balance.
The materials, processes and objects that emerge from the research Désirée conducted during her time at Gray’s appear as seemingly discrete elements in the resulting exhibition. There is a bold glow of neon here; a subtle, textural emboss on simple white paper there. Small tables topped with translucent glass bottles – that can be tipped to drip brine, in the production of more salt – quietly demand the viewer’s engagement, while those tins contain and conceal proof of the artist’s intensely undertaken labour, as glass fish look on blankly. These intriguing and apparently separate objects reflect the way in which salt exists in the world, in our cities, our economies, our land and seascapes, bodies and plates.
As part of her material research, Désirée collected a number of salt cellars and other containers, whose forms she engraved into acrylic and embossed on paper – almost invisible, but whispering long histories of status and monetary value. During an early conversation, she described how one of these containers, found in a junk shop, still had salt inside it that had, over many decades, eroded the metal. The tension between object and substance here is fascinating, reinforcing how utterly human we are in our relationship with salt: if we can remove our own needs, use and expectation, it becomes clear that this is less decay than a distinct and in fact beautiful chemical transformation, which tells us something about the power of a mineral that many of us take for granted.
Transformation is ever present in Désirée’s work. It makes me think of her and her practice itself, so interwoven with research and making. Just as salt, and other ingredients, shape and are shaped by the geographies that they move from, through and to, it seems to me that this artist is somebody deeply marked by each move, each new place and each encounter. And in turn, she has a remarkable ability to leave a mark, helping us interrogate and understand the places in which we live. She does this with depth, beauty and lightness, a combination that is difficult to achieve. The food writer Jay Rayner once described salt as, ‘the difference between eating in technicolour and eating in black and white’ (Jay Rayner, ‘I know salt’s unhealthy – but I love it’, Guardian, 19th February 2012). While the palette she has used in Aberdeen is muted, and reflective of the place and the substance in question, Désirée Coral has a way of interrogating and utilising materials that brings technicolour understanding to the places through which she moves.
About the artist
Désirée Coral is an artist based in Scotland where she received her Doctoral degree from DJCAD at the University of Dundee 2024 (with no corrections), and her MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018.
Her artistic practice and research critically engage with early global exchanges between the Americas and other regions, employing a decolonial framework to interrogate the hierarchical relationships among humans, non-human species, and the environment. These dynamics inform her exploration of contemporary foodscapes and foodways, which serve as the foundation of her artwork.
About the author
May Rosenthal Sloan is a curator and writer based in Glasgow; she co-curated FOOD: Bigger than the Plate (V&A, 2019), SOIL, The World at Our Feet (Somerset House, 2025) and edited London’s Kitchen: Industry Culture and Space in Park Royal (Dent-De-Leone, 2021), and is currently a curator at V&A Dundee.
About the programme
Launched in 2021, the Freelands Studio Fellowship takes place annually to connect six artists with partnered UK host universities. The programme aims to foster a symbiotic relationship between teaching and artistic practice to enrich both artists’ and students’ work, facilitated by the environment of the artist studio and within the specific context of an art school.