Artist Submerges Dress in the Dead Sea to Create Spectacular Salt-Covered Wedding Gown

(Illustration - NickolayV/Shutterstock)

Over the course of two months, the briny waters of the Dead Sea helped create an incredible work of art. Israeli sculptor Sigalit Landau submerged an early twentieth-century-style black dress under the surface, and salt accumulations formed on the gown into something truly spectacular.

A series of color underwater photographs showing the dress’s metamorphosis in one of the world’s saltiest seas was exhibited with the title “Salt Bride” at the Marlborough Art Gallery in London.

As sculptor Landau said in a press release shared by the gallery, the project was in part a tribute to the Dead Sea, a hypersaline lake whose shores are Earth’s lowest elevations on land. “It is like meeting with a different time system, a different logic, another planet,” the artist explained.

The project began with the black dress, the kind that would have been worn by Hasidic Jewish women in Eastern Europe about a century ago. The dress was weighed down to keep it submerged and then attached by fishing line to a floating framework to hold it in place.

Over a period of time, Landau’s collaborator, photographer Yotam From, dove underwater to photograph the black dress’s gradual transformation into a crystalline white statue, the black fabric completely enveloped in salt.

In addition to Landau’s interest in the effects of the sea on objects, which she explored in other submerged sculptures as well, the project was also inspired by a character named Leah from the classic Yiddish play “The Dybbuk” by S. Ansky, written between 1913 and 1916.

A highly sought-after young bride, Leah is possessed by the spirit of her would-be lover until she is exorcised. As the Marlborough Gallery explained in the release, “In Landau’s Salt Bride series, Leah’s black garb is transformed underwater as salt crystals gradually adhere to the fabric.”

They added, “Over time, the sea’s alchemy transforms the plain garment from a symbol associated with death and madness into the wedding dress it was always intended to be.”

Landau describes the work as it appeared two months after being submerged in the waters—which are nine times saltier than the ocean. “It looks like snow, like sugar, like death’s embrace,” she said, “solid tears, like a white surrender to fire and water combined.”

(Ido Meirovich/Shutterstock)

Landau has been working in the Dead Sea since 2003 and has specialized in using natural salts and processes to create her works. “This mineral is really like rocks,” she told PBS. “You put something completely flimsy and weightless and after the sea and the crystals and the accumulation, you’re raising something which has multiplied its weight times 10, times 20.”

Among the other objects that Landau has experimented with are musical instruments, shoes, and even a ballerina’s tutu that represented her past as a dancer. Landau herself has a personal connection with the Dead Sea, as she often visited there as a child with her family.

“I go to the Dead Sea because it is like the moon, it is unique, it has laws of its own and because I grew up by this terminal lake,” she shared in the Marlborough Gallery press release.

As the Dead Sea continues to evaporate, and its shorelines recede, Landau’s project alludes to the natural transformations occurring there. “I work in many mediums, but there’s something about the Dead Sea,” she says. “I’m proud of realizing that I chose to stay close to it.”