This photo was made in the summer of 2024. The location is around the western corner of Petrel Cove on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It was the late afternoon to avoid the bright light of the summer sun.
The dried out salt depends on high tides, no sand cover, and the summer heat to evaporate the seawater in the rock pools during the day. Outside of summer there are the various rock pools that do not evaporate.
I have started reading Patrick McCaughey's 1969 book Australian Abstract Art. He says that there is no absolute distinction between abstract and representational art, that much Australian abstraction keeps in close contact with the physical world, and its aim is not to give an illusion of the physical world but to provide us with an experience of it (p.3).
McCaughey argued that the Sydney modernists (eg., Ralph Batson, Grace Cowley) in the 1950s embraced a constructivist interpretation of abstraction as a new order different from the natural order: ie., a new vision appropriate to the 20th century. This is linked by McCaughey to Moholy-Nagy's book The New Vision. The new vision was rooted in the technological culture of the twentieth century.
This abstraction of salt + coastal granite rocks was made whilst I was on an afternoon poodlewalk with Maleko amongst some coastal rocks west of Petrel Cove on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia.
It had been a hot summers day and the small pools of water that usually lie amongst the granite rocks from the high tide in the morning had evaporated. I made a number of studies of these salt abstractions that afternoon.
Another in the salt abstract series:
These salt ponds are very ephemeral. They only appear during the hot weather when the heat of the summer sun dries out the various rocks pools after a high tide.
From late spring in 2017:
This was made on a poodlewalk amongst the granite rocks west of Dep's Beach.
This picture was made with the newly acquired Sony A7r111 digital camera whilst I was on a poodlewalk to the foot of the Newland Heads in Waitpinga:
These little salt ponds are very ephemeral. They are there one day, gone the next.
This was made on a poodlewalk yesterday with Heather Petty, and Kayla and Maleko:
Heather, who is a Nikon DSLR photographer, had a new Sony premium compact camera with her, which she was trying out before she started to use it for her underwater photography. It was a Sony Cyber-shot DSC RX100V --with a fixed lens I think. It is compact in the sense that Heather could put the camera in her pocket.
The Sony DSC RX100V's point and shoot characteristic makes it ideal for underwater photography.