What can salt tell us about our changing world?

Salt is essential to human life and intrinsic to the make-up of our oceans, but it can also damage our health, corrode buildings and transform landscapes. Now, an international research project led by the University of Brighton is using this familiar substance to explore our relationship with a changing environment.

Saline Ecologies: artistic salt practices at the edges of body, object and land brings together artists, researchers and specialists across disciplines to investigate how salt moves through bodies, buildings, water, soil and plants, and what those connections can reveal about environmental and ecological change.

Led by Dr Katy Beinart at the University of Brighton and artist Catherine Bertola at Teesside University, the 18-month programme will take place across Venice, Hastings, Teesside and Brighton, using artistic and sensory practices to explore salt through different landscapes, histories and areas of expertise.

Dr Katy Beinart talking during a salt workshop

Salty workshop - postcards credited to Catherine Bertola

The project begins in Venice this October, a city whose past and present are intimately connected with salt. As well as facing the effects of changing salinity within its lagoon, Venice was historically a major centre of the salt trade, with taxation on salt helping to fund the city's development.

The first event, Saline Ecologies: Dissolving, will be hosted by the New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

A free public workshop on 23 October, led by artist Alessio Mazzaro, will bring artistic practice into conversation with perspectives from architecture, engineering and medicine. Participants will explore the effects of salt across bodies, buildings and plants, from its role in human health and wellbeing to the corrosion and deterioration it can cause in the built environment.

Together, they will create a conceptual map of the connections emerging from the discussion, contributing to the wider research project.

Dr Katy Beinart said: “The project grew from a group of artist-researchers sharing our different practices with salt and recognising its potential as a way of exploring different forms of ecology.

“My own work with salt began with my family history and led to a wider interest in the salt trade, its historic value and its role in histories of trade, colonialism, slavery and empire. Salt connects the personal with much bigger environmental, social and historical stories, which is something we want to explore through this project.”

Funded through a Curiosity Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Saline Ecologies is a partnership between the University of Brighton, Teesside University, NICHE at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Hastings Contemporary.

Following Venice, the programme will travel to Hastings Contemporary in February 2027 and Teesside University in April, before culminating in a conference in Brighton in June 2027.

Across these locations, researchers will explore the different “edges” created and revealed by salt - between land and water, bodies and environments, past and present, and different disciplines and ways of understanding ecological change.

To find out more about Saline Ecologies and its upcoming events, email Dr Katy Beinart at K.Beinart@brighton.ac.uk.

Staff related to this story

Dr Katy Beinart

Senior Lecturer – School of Arch, Tech and Eng

Centre for Spatial and Social Justice, Centre for Arts and Wellbeing, Experimental Design Practices Research Excellence Group, Radical Methodologies (RaM) Research Excellence Group