Bindi Vora utilizes various analogue processes, often taking inspiration from her everyday surroundings, which include her personal archive. Vora’s work teases out subtle marks and pigments within the materials she uses, such as negatives and photographic paper; the results often create vast spaces of colour, light and subtle detail that contemplate ideas of perception and representation of the photographic print. She is interested in the way materials or ephemera can be reused or recycled to create new narratives but can be traced back to other works, almost like interconnected tissues.

Mountain of Salt is an expansive body of work comprised of found images, appropriated text and digital shape collages, initially conceptualized as a human response to the unfolding of Covid-19. In March 2020 Vora like many others became acutely aware of the landscape we were living in, where everything felt amplified; clinging to the news for updates and statistics and in our own ways of analysing the information being shared with us. For Vora it highlighted the way words and speech have a physical presence, a bearing upon us.

The early iterations of Mountain of Salt began to take form in this very context. Comprising found photographs and digital shape collages, each married to phrases and statements appropriated from news articles, press conferences, and social media, the 371-strong series traces the interweaving social, political and ideological arcs of the early phases of the pandemic, the post-Brexit era, and Black Lives Matter, landing squarely on the potency of language.

Through a cacophony of visual and textual fragments, this book revels in the tension between the micro and macro, the individual and collective, and the personal and political, teasing out and making connections between the individual events and linguistic armatures that come to build broader historical eras and movements. The outcomes are incisive, sober, witty, and wry, magnifying language’s ability to both define and dispel the collective mood. Drowning in a morass of information, phrases, photographs, infographics, throwaway lines, and revolutionary dictums, Vora’s visually poetic works echo the unfixed contemporary state. A place where alarm, agitation, desensitisation, and bemusement seem to intersect. Where words – free of hierarchy, nuance, and context – prove as absurd as they are critical. Mountain of Salt reads as a resolve to use them with great care.