Salty Tears

When I heard that I was going to be working with salt in this practice I immediately thought of tears. As I looked into tears, I found out that they are salty because everything in our bodies is salty, even our blood, which was a very interesting fact to me. Also interesting is the fact that there are three types of tears.

1. Basal tears
2. Reflex tears
3. Emotional tears

All three if these types of tears are almost identical, except for the fact that in some cases the third type, emotional tears, can contain hormones. There is a theory that this is because your body needs to get rid of excess hormones, this hasn't been proven yet. Initially the science behind tears was very interesting to me, but I wanted something different.

I personally cry a lot and was curious about the possibilities with my own tears, so right away I started collecting my own tears, after a few good cries I realized that I was't going to be able to produce and collect enough tears on my own. Since in the collection process a lot of tears get lost and tears evaporate extremely fast.

So I asked the people around me for their tears. At first they just started collecting in cups but then the tears evaporated too fast. I personally collect in a small bottle, but not everybody has such a handy bottle at home, so I thought of having them collect it in a tissue. By just carefully dabbing up their tears with a tissue, more of the tear remains.

Whilst all of this was happening I experimented with salt as a material, I really fell in love with it. So many interesting textures and visuals are possible, and it is very cheap. One of my favorite tests was the salt jelly in the heat press, it creates this very beautiful almost crystal like sheet. I really wanted to incorporate this technique in my tear project. To in a way create individual salt crystals for every "cry". The downside is that it is extremely brittle and very difficult to transport, still I wanted to try.

Next to these tests I also got recommended some artists I should look into. One of them being Rose-Lynn Fisher, who works with tears by photographing them under a microscope. These pictures are visually very pleasing so I wanted to try to recreate those, and maybe i could see a visual difference in different tears from different people. Sadly this specific microscope did not nearly have enough zoom power to really get a look at the contents of the tears. We did however still get some interesting shots.

The second artist that was interesting to me was Aliki van der Kruijs with Made by Rain, het project, as the title suggests is about rain, not tears, but still she has a created a very interesting database which I took inspiration from. Because of het project I asked my collection group to not alone collect their tears for me but also give me some data on their "cries". The what, where and why? I decided to combine this information with the crystals I created, in the heat press.

This together became my Salty TEARS project.