Israeli artist Sigalit Landau grew up on the shores of the Dead Sea. Since her childhood, the saltiest body of water on the planet has fascinated and enchanted her. When Sigalit took up art, salt became one of her favorite materials to create her artwork. The most recent is an unusual wedding dress.
Sigalit Landau submerged the dress in Dead Sea water for two years, and after the appointed time, she pulled a real masterpiece out of the water!
Israeli artist Sigalit Landau has already created several works with Dead Sea salt. Her latest project is called The Salt Bride. For it, she immersed a wedding dress in Dead Sea water – and got ready to wait.
The artist was inspired by the play Dibbuk, written in 1916 by Roy Henna. It tells the story of a Hasidic girl who is about to marry a man from a well-to-do family, but is possessed by the spirit of her dead lover.
The dress that Sigalit Landau took for her project is an exact replica of the heroine’s dress she wore during a performance of Dybbuk in the 1920s. Dipping the dress into the sea, Sigalit regularly visited it, watching it get covered in salt crystals.
According to the artist, this transfromation was supposed to be a symbol of the path that the heroine of “Dybbuk” took, as well as her own relationship with the Dead Sea. However, the project did not develop quite the way Sigalit had intended…
“Year after year I learned more and more about this amazing place below the surface of the world’s oceans,” says Sigalit Landau. “Magic lives here, generating new experiments, ideas, insights. It’s as if you’re encountering a completely different culture and notions of time, having found yourself on another planet.”
Sigalit had a rough idea of what the dress would look like after two years spent in salt water. She left the process entirely to the elements, not trying to interfere.
The biggest surprise for the artist was the enormous weight of her new work, which became very heavy due to the numerous salt crystals. To lift the dress out of the water, they had to call in special equipment.
The resulting masterpiece salt dress is now on display at London’s Museum of Modern Art as part of the Salted Bride exhibition.
