Salt Print (La Somme 1916)2010 Limited Edition of 4

Salt Print (La Somme, 1916) is a double-track spine of military tank treads that Cole cast with pure table salt.

Traditionally, casting is intended to embed an event or a figure in history, or to script one’s legacy. However, Cole selected salt because of its transient relationship to landscape and to mankind. It is a seemingly simple, innocuous material that is wrought with historic significance, complexity and contradiction.

Salt has been used to preserve, and to destroy; it once held coveted value, and has become commonplace; it has powerful cultural and ritualistic significance for some, while being utterly valueless to others.

Cole used his Rappaport Prize to fabricate a custom furnace designed to melt salt in order to cast it, which requires heating the mineral to a higher degree than is necessary to melt metal. Cole cast the part of the first tank from WWI that touches ground and leaves a temporary print on the earth as it passes through its own wake.

Landscape, the ultimate canvas of time, is a recurring metaphor throughout Cole’s work. Salt Print (La Somme, 1916), is at once a ghostly remnant, a loaded memory of violence, and a beautiful, light- permeable, abstraction.