Britt Salt
Artist Statement 2007

I am interested in the origins of building as akin to textile construction, using methodical processes such as building, folding and weaving as ways of drawing. 

I work with functional and industrial materials such as thread, paper and metal for their transparent material properties and ephemeral or transient visual qualities. These qualities contribute to the seen and unseen nature of the forms and imagery of my practice. The inherent material qualities of this work, creates a space subject to its own material flux and change. 

This material investigation feeds my interests in line. For me, a single line embodies a materiality or inherent material nature which is simple in appearance yet complex in its construction. Any one line of thread holds the potential for great strength and humble delicacy; when warping up a loom, spanning threads across the frame, one line creates a structure which runs parallel, folds into and intersects with itself.

In my work, one single line may be drawn through a series of woven layers, suspended in space. The tension of the thread holds the line steady, its form changing from a single dot in the weave, to a solid line span as the viewer moves around the work.
My practice interacts with the continual warp of a line; a process of drawn, woven, folded and built linear constructions which interact with the viewers’ visual perception. These constructions create structures which merge with one another and drive my research of the origins and relationship between architectural and textile processes as akin.

Beginning once with the surface covering of a woven fibrous wall, contemporary architecture is becoming increasingly transfixed with the relationship between interior and exterior built environments. Roof trusses can simultaneously be the interior structural support and exterior surface pattern of a built form. Such spaces can be experienced as both interior and exterior. The boundary between interior and exterior spaces can be blurred. 
Similarly, my material investigation shifts between surface, structure, form and space using methodical processes which begin and end with one superb line.