We become nothing but salt

Glass cast submerged in river Severn

“The waters symbolize the universal sum of virtualities; they are fons et origo, ‘spring and origin’, the reservoir of all the possibilities of existence; they precede every form and support every creation … Emersion repeats the cosmogonic act of formal manifestation; immersion is equivalent to a dissolution of forms. This is why the symbolism of the waters implies both death and rebirth. Contact with water always brings a regeneration – on the one hand because dissolution is followed by a new birth, on the other because immersion fertilizes and multiplies the potential of life.”

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane , Harvest, 1959 

This photo is the final outcome of a glass casting of a snail. The Littorina Obtusata seasnail shells, the remains of their existence, gather in the gullies at low tide in their millions. It was also a response to lost of my mother, as a kind of memento mori (remember you have to die). After she lost her fight against cancer in 1993 she had no wish for a grave for us to tend. Acknowledging that we are finite creatures, that memories fade, in essence a quite acceptance of our mortality. Life is a short sensuous corporeality bounded by time. That eventually through those cosmic rhythms the glass cast will be tossed around, scarred and dissolve back into the sand holding only a faint imprint of its prior existence.