SALT is a collaborative artwork produced by Ella Sutherland for the exhibition Friendship as a Way of Life at UNSW Galleries, Sydney.

Taking the form of a decorative display font, SALT is comprised of found letterforms collected by 26 contributors connected to Sutherland’s queer landscape.

SALT works against the shaping of standardise form to instead consider the capacity of letters to embody queer experience. In this light, we may read the characters of SALT as both a system of shapes for communication, and a network of moments: each holding the conceptual and material conditions of design, and the experience of reading.

Lizzie Thomson, Melissa Ratliff, Brian Fuata, Holly Best, Emma Rodigari, Elena Betros López, Sidney McMahon, Eleanor Weber, Salote Tawale, Riet Wijnen, Pip Wallis, Verónica Tello, Miranda Parkes, Abby Cunnane (with letter 'o' from Gregory O'Brien's lithograph, The Non-Singing Seats [for Maxwell Fernie], 2009), Sophie Davis, Ashlin Raymond, Julia Bavyka, Imogen Taylor, Agatha Gothe-Snape (The first T in The First Writing Book: An English Translation and Facsimile Text of Arrighi's Operina, The First Manual of the Chancery Hand 1955, from the library of Margo Snape, from whom I didn’t learn enough), Henry Davidson (Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City), Marnie Slater (based on Pink Vagina, a video installation by Wynne Greenwood), Aodhan Madden, Clare Noonan (Eileen Myles, Inferno [A Poet's Novel]), Ana Iti, Sarah Rodigari (Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name)

Produced by Ella Sutherland
Commissioned by UNSW Galleries, 2020

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-commercial, Share-alike 4.0 International License.

We pay our respects to all Traditional Custodians on whose land this work was made.